Rivertrain

Sisi and the Achilleon at Corfu

2012-02-14T21:57:00.007+01:00

Inside the Achilleon

She never really took to court life. She was drawn to literature, she liked reading, open windows, evening light. Walking and horse-riding. Her horses, she loved them. Revered Achilles, that marvel of a man. Possibly she doted on her husband too or at least looked up to him, believed in his romantic feelings, matching her own, but royal matches were never simply about feelings or solely about feelings or about feelings for a sole person. It did not take long for her to see his failings, which could not be hidden by his emperor's clothes, his finery. For he was an Emperor, of Austria.

She – a democrat before her time – wanted equality for the Hungarian people. They loved her for that. She pushed for the restoration of the Hungarian constitution, and the dual monarchy, Austria-Hungary. She became Empress Elizabeth, affectionately known as Sisi, at the age of 16, when she married Franz Joseph. But spent more and more time with her books, while her husband pursued his ruling duties – and other affairs. She took to travelling.

In Budapest they named a district after her, Erzebetvaros.

She had a palace built in Corfu, overlooking a bay of green water. The grounds were studded with pine trees. A statue of Achilles on a high plinth, has his back turned to the trimmed rose bush planted gardens, with archways shaded by vine leaves. He gazes out, over the sea. She called the museum the Achilleon. Huge pastoral paintings hang on the walls. Porcelain bowls painted with rose and blue patterns. Echoing empty rooms.

She had it built as a refuge, after the death of her only son, Prince Rudolf, but she did not enjoy it for long. Refuges can often be scarred places, inhabited by the very memories or feelings one is trying to evade. And so Elizabeth had to keep moving, so as not to be gripped by sadness, her life's disappointments, the shedding of dreams, filling days with departures and shifting scenery, setting foot on new shores.

Geneva's lake shore was the last one she knew. She was due to leave in the morning for Montreux. But one Luigi Lucheni had planned to assassinate the prince of Orléans. When the prince failed to put in an appearance at Geneva and, having learned of Elizabeth's presence there, the frustrated would-be assassin of royalty turned his sharp knife on Elizabeth, the least royalist of any royal. One of these strange conjunctions of time, place and circumstances that feels both entirely misplaced yet oddly fated.

You can read more about Elisabeth here.

Time and Timeless

2012-01-29T21:31:00.012+01:00

Built on the site of a Roman sanctuary, Strasbourg's Cathedral apparently was the tallest building in the world from 1647 to 1874.

Its interior is certainly lofty. Huge tapestries hang alongside the main aisle, like giant curtains. There is a sens de passage meaning you're supposed to walk around in the directon indicated, which one can understand when there are so many people that free roaming tourists would be hazardous to health and circulation but there are few people in the early morning. I take my chance and dodge to the side of the rows of seats, head for the astronomical clock at the rear, to one side of the altar but separated by various pillars and vaulted compartments, as well as a booth selling postcards and other knick knacks.

The clock has its own vaulted roofed area, guarded by a pillar carved with angels. This clock is also vast, consisting of several different parts, the higher ones soaring into obscurity. How it works is clearly the product of immense calculations, none of which are immediately evident. But there is one circle which shows the zodiac signs – hard to see clearly in the dim light, but it is there, just discernible.

Two guardian figures on a circle below the zodiac may represent Apollo, the sun god, daytime deity, and Diana, moon goddess of the night and it is delightful to see them here, represented in this Christian church, built mostly in the 12^th to 13^th centuries.

This clock is actually the third version. The first was created in the middle of the 14^th century. When it stopped working a second one was made and the present one dates from 1838-42. The first one, interestingly, had at its base a painted figure of a zodiacal man showed the relationship between the signs of the zodiac and parts of the human body. You can read more about the clock here.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strasbourg_astronomical_clock

It might seem surprising to us now, that a church should show so blatantly a relationship between humanity and the zodiac but in those days, astrological depictions of zodiac signs were not considered improper far less heretical. Just think of Chartres cathedral with its stained glass windows of zodiac signs. After all, in the 12^th and 13^th centuries there were real heresies to be attacked and relentlessly extirpated – such as the Cathars of the Languedoc. A relationship between the human body and zodiac signs was still probably so embedded in people's thinking as really, not to be questioned.

That would come later, much later, when Johannes Kepler's visionary and painstaking research into the nature of the planetary paths around the sun opened the way for a different way of thinking about the celestial spheres, the macro-cosmos, and earth and us, the micro-cosmos. The two had been indissolubly linked together by Hermes Trismegistus

http://www.themystica.com/mystica/articles/a/below_above.html

(as above, so below) a long time before the Christian religion, but this idea of the two worlds - the divine and the human - being linked in some way or another if not necessarily direct cause and effect relationship via the planets, had long been part of the human psyche, until Kepler's time – late 16^th, early 17^th centuries.

What Kepler did – unintentionally – was to draw a hairline thin crack between these two – macro and micro cosmos, for his calculations were stripped bare of divine shapes, solids or packaging – such as nested spheres – and did not rely on divine geometry as a whole. He was not looking for any divine plan, he wanted to see what was actually happening.

He discovered that the planetary revolutions around the sun were not perfect circles, or of a regular speed and this discovery introduced the faintest whiff of suspicion. Could it be that the creations, i.e. the planets, of the Divine Cosmic Spinner were not geometrically perfect? And if the creations were not perfect what did that say about their Creator? The corrosive acid of doubt set in. Perhaps the worlds were not held together by a mighty sustaining force after all? Perhaps relationships between macro and micro were not necessarily divine, enduring, everlasting, perfect?

And so was born our modern, scientific worldview, which tests and calculates, based on what can actually be seen and measured.

But of course, the planetary movements can indeed be seen and measured as Kepler was one of the first to demonstrate. It's the relationships of these movements with humanity's psychology, with our thoughts, feelings and actions, which are more hotly contested. But at least they haven't been scrubbed out, like altered photographs, edited out in an attempt to falsify history. In fact they are surprisingly enduring, these zodiac signs. Perhaps because they depict the timeless constellations. And it is good to see them here – for they too are constructs of human imagination and design, – to see them here in this dazzling architecture, combining ethereal imagination and sublime craftsmanship.

Orange Palette, Waterways

2012-01-06T21:18:00.007+01:00

Il fait du vent? asks S, looking out of the kitchen window, into the dark garden. Enough light spills out to see tree branches close to the window, moving a little. P says that yes, it is windy. He, after all, has ventured outside as he came to the train station, to pick me up.

I'd forgotten to make an early reservation for the TGV from Strasbourg to Paris. All seats on TGVs have to be reserved – c'est obligatoire – and I discover that a lot of people are travelling on New Year's Day and clearly prefer the morning trains. The only train which is not complet is one that leaves later in the afternoon. I then have to get from Gare de l'Est to Gare St. Lazare, not a great distance, but I have to change at Chaussee d'Antin la Fayette and because of some strange squiggles on the metro map that resembles zig-zags of lightning, I get off not at St. Lazare but at Havre Caumartin. This is not far away, but it's dark and I don't recognize where I am. As well as a small rucksack, I'm pulling along my case-on-wheels, with shoulder bag tied to it. Also I'm wearing all my winter clothes – thick jumper and padded gilet over my jacket and Paris is ridiculously warm - so I have to stop and take off my jumper and stuff it in my bag. But after asking the way, I discover it is not far to Gare St. Lazare, and I just make the 18.50 train which is a fast intercité to Le Havre, first stop Rouen Rive Droit, arriving just after 19.00.

Huh, I say, that's not wind. That's just some god breathing, maybe giving a little sigh now and again.

Or perhaps a demon, says P, always liking to scatter a handful of darkness into a conversation to throw people out of any possible complacency, to keep them on the qui vive.

But, he concedes, maybe for you Scottish people, that's not wind, but for us sensitive Breton types –

Of course they have winds on the continent, but much more frequently than happens on these islands, there are days of stillness, serenity, pure balm for the soul. And when it rains, even if it's heavy, the rain falls straight down, with an admirable lack of guile, the directness of its attack making you feel that your opponent is worthy of your attention, making the game enjoyable to play.

The next day, for example, I set out to walk to the city centre under a blue sky, bright sunlight. On the way I pass a splendidly arranged épicerie, with displays of mostly orange fruit, dazzling to the eyes. Clearly care has gone into the colour selection, dark

yellow grapefruit with tinges of pink, next to orange with green, then yellow-green apples with blushes of pink.

But by the time I reached the bridge over the Seine, plump and purple clouds had glided towards the river and fired a fusillade of raindrops at it, water to water. I had not brought an umbrella but I sheltered under the bridge, until it passed. No wind, the rain fell directly downwards, no deception, or sleight of hand. And, just as it was leaving, a sheet of mist, illuminated by sunlight, shone across the river, a pearly halo. This weather was a belle-lettre, a love song, clearly, to its sister water, the wide Seine, with its moored cargo of boats.

The second song came when I was sitting outside a café in the Place Jeanne d'Arc. Sheltered by a canopy, the rain leapt and tumbled in the street and when the canvas canopy shifted a little, the gathered rain emptied itself like a sower flinging a handful of seeds, a sheet of water with a fringe of pearls.

And even the roan pipes that conduct water from rooftops into drains, have turned into water creatures, returning water to water, in an ongoing cycle – how lovely, these artistic touches...

Solstice, Rebirth, Resurrection

2011-12-21T22:29:00.006+01:00

Colmar also has its festive decorations but the reason I went there today was to see again the paintings by Grunewald in the Unterlinden Museum. Actually, really only one, The Risen Christ. When I first saw a reproduction of this several years ago, I felt like shouting for joy. Or singing many hosannas. For all the paintings and sculptures and representations of Christ on the cross, these ubiquitous images, where I wondered, were the uplifting ones, that showed that life never dies, that shows rebirth and renewal? Well, we have one. Two actually, as today in the Unterlinden, I saw another one, by Martin Schongauer. But the Grunewald is still the most impressive.

In the early hours of the 22^nd December, the sun moves from the sign of Sagittarius into Capricorn. In other words, astronomically, we have the solstice, and from now on, the days get longer, the sun rises higher in the sky, there is more light. Before the emergence of the religions that we are familiar with today, this time was celebrated by people who we call pagan nowadays [from the Latin paganus, which simply means the countryside, the land]. When humanity and nature were in closer communion than they are today. The sun, Sol, was worshipped as the life-bringer that it is. A great feast was held, to celebrate this occasion of the solstice – the Saturnalia. The Christian celebration of Christmas was grafted onto this seasonal and celebratory event.

For me, it is still, and always, about this blazing star, this source of light, we circle around on our small and astonishingly beautiful planet.

Solstice, from the Latin, means the sun stops, stands still. It does not of course, actually stop. But something shifts, changes direction, at this time of year. And because it involves the relationship between earth and sun you could say that everything changes. The angle of the light as it hits earth and us, will become less acute, moving away from horizontal as the sun climbs higher in the sky.

Meanwhile, we are always spinning around the sun. Extraordinary.

The Winter King on the German Border

2011-12-15T22:04:00.006+01:00

La piste des forts is the name of the bicycle path that goes from Strasbourg, over the Rhine and into Germany. It's well named. If you were not strong before you started you will be less so once you've done it. Huge trucks barrel along the main road and while the cycle path is off to one side, I still get showered with murky moisture from the puddles that sprayed out from the truck wheels.

This is my first time out on the bike. I first had to find the bike shop to get the saddle lowered. It looked easy enough on the map, the bridge, the border, Germany, is very close. But of course it's always different in actuality. Still, after only a few kilometers, over the Pont de l'Europe I go, and reach Kehl, the small town on the other side of the border.

The weather all morning has been dark and lowering, with little bursts of rain. But once I reach Kehl the rain becomes earnest. But still, the cycle paths are marked. You want to go to Offenburg, to Kork? It's clear which way to go. I shelter under an archway for a while and then the rain eases. I set off again, and soon find myself outside the small town, and on a towpath that follows a stretch of water. It leads to another road, not too busy, and still, there is the bicycle path at the side. Trees line this road, which goes over a bridge, swings to the right, skirts Neumühl and a couple of kilometres later, I arrive in Kork, which is really only a village, with a few shops, a school, some delightful looking wooden fronted houses, and a square with a statue of a kneeling bull. The inscription underneath is very hard to make out but it seems to involve a legend of a wild bull kneeling before some prince or other

By this time the sun has come out.

I head back in the same direction, but fail to find the quiet towpath. The wind is now against me, the sky has returned to its threatening ways, its billows of purple like a bag of many sighs drifting across the sky, its colour between violet and indigo, massing around the mountains of the schwarzwald, the black forest, and spreading outwards.

I decide to stop in Kehl on the way back, for refreshment and a rest. I head for the town centre, where there's a near empty square, with dried leaves scuttling across it, caught up in snatches of wind like fitful half-remembered prayers. Bright lights on one side of the square announce a Euro shop. There's a café bar in the middle of the otherwise empty square, with outside tables underneath large awnings. One client, an elderly man, sits at a table, smoking and drinking coffee, looking out over the deserted grey square. Next to him is one of these admirable heaters for outside clientèle, but it's not on.

I sit down a couple of tables away, with a view to two sides of the square – the tourist information office in front of me, and the church to one side. The church has a stolid appearance, reddish stone, functional. While I wait for coffee the wind increases its irritated bursts and rain patters on the canvas table awnings. The man gazes straight ahead of him, seeming indifferent to the vagaries of the weather, the unchanging scene. A friendly woman, who I take to be la patronne, comes out and asks me if I'd like anything. Möchete ich ein Kaffee haben bitte I beam, delighted to be able to practice my threadbare German. She is all smiles. She then goes to the elderly gentleman says something to him. Later she comes out with my coffee and places in front of the man an enormous dish of ice cream, heaped with layers of white, cream and caramel colours.

I decide he must be the Old King of Winter, out surveying what his lesser functionaries are up to. Perhaps he's deeply displeased with the intermittent nature of the bursts of wind, the rain as if thrown from a colander that's quickly emptied, the clouds that have stirred up trouble in the mountains of the Schwarzwald but have lost their impetus when confronted with the mighty Rhine, its smooth waters, its working boats carrying and offloading freight, barges with smudged and peeling paintlines, dusted with coal and mud, its ports and dockland areas, its vast dignity and importance, the rainbow of history wrapped around its banks. Perhaps he's wondered why the scourges of winter have taken so long. There's nothing he can do about the Rhine, but surely the clouds could be persuaded to form ice pellets high up in the stratosphere, to make percussive noises on taut canvas and tin roofs?

Mid December, and people can still walk around without hats and gloves, even though the wind messes their hair it's true, with its fingers, made keen and supple from spending time among the lean pines of the black forest, crowding on the slopes of the mountains. Time on its hands in small-town Kehl, the wind chases the dried leaves, then heads for the bridges over the Rhine, where it sweeps over the water in a kind of reverential ecstasy at being so close to the River King. Meanwhile, the Winter King spoons his ice cream and gazes at the tourist information office. The canvas awnings thud and crack in the wind.

When I've finished my coffee I head for the tourist office, to practise my German. I want to know which direction to go in, to reach Strasbourg. The assistant beams at me, her only customer, explains where to go, says it's signposted, shows me on a map and then insists I take it with me. Such delightful friendliness!

I cross the bridge, la passerelle du jardin des deux rives. Built to demonstrate the harmonious relationship between the two countries, with its gardens on both banks of the Rhine, it is for pedestrians and cyclists. There is even an area in the middle with tables and benches, should you want to stop and contemplate the river, the boats, the sky, the sense of being on an historic border, the history and trade of this area, the terrible conflicts of the past century, the hope for continued positive relations in Europe in this one.

The wind is fierce so I decide to pass on contemplation. Beyond the French side of the jardin des deux rives you come out into a main road of heavy traffic. I dodge into side streets, a whole area of the Porte du Rhin, a closed SNCF train station, an abandoned, roofless building, road works, dockland areas, mud-spattered roads. The kind of place you would not want to be lost in. Heading in the vague direction of the north part of town I eventually arrive in the spruce architecture of central Strasbourg, not far from home.

City of Reflections

2011-12-10T21:43:00.005+01:00

Strasbourg is a city full of water-surfaces, as if many rivers undulate and flow through it although it's really only one, divided up, and with canal-like tributaries coming off the main river, the Ill. So it is also a city of bridges, and of reflections. And at this time of year it is a city of Christmas markets. They are crammed into the main squares, and some of the streets are decorated with small santas, polar bears, windows festooned with glitter and wreaths and gingerbread houses, with leafless trees painted white to look frost covered, with loops and twirls and bunches of lights. Scene after scene of theatrical gaudiness and glitter, fairy tale worlds that have edged into the usual streets of the everyday world, with their commercial signs and their colourful frontages designed to catch people's attention.

But Strasbourg already has fairy tale buildings, striped with wooden beams of different colours, walls leaning away from perpendicular, sagging or sloping, with latticed windows or small windows you can hardly see through, or coloured glass windows

with dim and blurred shadows passing behind them.

It also has an immense cathedral. But it is not like the cathedrals of Chartres or Rouen, which have a much more solid and planted appearance, like stone equivalents of massive oak trees or yews. This one is more like a silver birch or poplar, with its slender spire rising like a pointed spindle, around which the world must surely turn and spin, while there are all kinds of lesser revolutions in shaped and decorated stone curling inwards or outwards like scenes from different times depicted in the faux naïve style of the days before perspective was inserted into images and we were obliged to look at paintings in sequential fashion. And take time to read it. Take time to enter the story and carry the story back with us into our daily life and conversations so they rubbed against the rules and mores of our days, or shaped them maybe, underlined them, justified them, gave them a bulwark of credentials. Haven't the structures of our lives always been bolstered by the grand stories, etched in their dilemmas, their theatricals, their challenges and their light? Their long journeys, their years of tribulation, their struggle from oppression into freedom, their angelic guidances, their prophecies of what would come?

The ancient wood fronted buildings are skewed by time and lean against each other and look out over the river, where willows branches drift down to the water, still with green and yellow twisted ropes of leaves. Smells of burnt chestnuts, smells of cinnamon and spice. A pianist plays gentle music à la Keith Jarrett, near inaudible until you're very close. I stand a few metres away and listen, and the sound of all the voices, the crowds of people speaking French, German, Italian, all disappear and there is just this whispering music like the sound of water running and splashing over stony paths and falling into pools and you have to come close up to hear what it is saying.

The Portrait and the Real

2011-12-04T00:01:00.007+01:00

[Extract from Journal, December 2010]

While you are recounting your pictures and impressions of this person –

She said – I dreamed about a dog I'd left behind – how could I have forgotten about it, how could I?

You think you are presenting her as clear as a portrait – clear and complete, with severe borders, stiff and solid, just the way you like them -

No stray threads, no paths leading nowhere, no fuzzy parts you could misinterpret or have to strain to see – no doubt you see, no doubt -

She, meanwhile, is someone else entirely, snagged with her private half-formed thoughts, uncertainty like a snapped dried stem of plant, blotched brown and dirty yellow – in dry weather the creamy colour of starched sunlight, in wet, like this, with snow turning to sludge and mixed with a colour of dark and rotting fruit, pale ivory turns into blotchy pulp.

The clouds are not so much clouds as the weight of Questions that will not be answered, piled like centuries one on top of the other until they form a palisade of quilted years, their stuffing half pulled from their sides, as if mad dogs attacked them, then lost interest.

Soaked questions, mauled by hunger and by time. A future world is horror-struck by the bloated debris of a world maddened by its loss of memory of who it really is – so it turns on itself, and rips its fabric of forgetting – in the way a trapped creature will gnaw at its own body, to free itself. This is what this civilization will be seen as, in a future that will live within its memory of Who it Really Is – a filigree of gold, a droplet of sunlight, the heartbeat of a star.

While now – we cannot breathe properly beneath the metal bands of clouds, our lungs cannot expand and so – we forget what air tastes like, how it can fill us – how it once could – we forget that we are the air – selfhood, crushed by cloud weight -

All these things are passing through her mind, and her body signals lack of sky and lack of warmth and the reassurance of movement -

She looks solid – she glows with definition, she feels like the aftermath of a clenched fist – whittled and splintered, damp and indecisive – then she half-turns and – though the sky has not changed, its texture and shade like half-melted snow – she remembers something someone once said to her – the dark honey in the voice and gesture – like someone's finger on her arm, she is arrested, she is loved, and she bites the neck off brittle stalks, tears them with her hands, feels prickly burrs against her palms and remembers the feeling of how juice is sucked out of her then how it surges back across her skin like light.

Launch of Gold Tracks Fallen Fruit

2011-11-22T22:19:00.007+01:00

Kathy Kituai introduced me to tanka last year, with her splendid collection, Straggling into Winter, a tanka journal. I experimented with five-line poems but as they are not strictly tanka, I decided to give them another name – quinta. The idea of journaling in poetry [I have written prose journals for almost as long as I can remember] was also appealing. So the book, a selection from the many quinta I've written over the past year, has just been published by Cestrian Press. I was reading from Gold Tracks, Fallen Fruit, in Chester last Thursday. Kemal Houghton was also reading from his new collection, Pastizzi, and Edwin Stockdale played ethereal music on the harp.

Journal and journey of course share the same root, and within our long – or short - passage through time and space, our lifetime, a journey that everyone makes, there are also forays into the unknown, geographical, psychological and metaphorical, the wanderings and the stories, and how we are changed by the features of the landscapes we pass through.

As I was travelling back through Italy and France earlier this year, in the summer, I was thinking about the effects that travelling can have on us, very positive effects, so it seems to me, as one is removed from one's usual context and one's usual identity. With these familiar accretions of identity removed, who are we really? For although we 'identify with' all kinds of familiarities, it has been my experience at times, that there is another identity waiting in the wings. Our usual associations and patterns of thoughts and feelings are removed by some circumstance or other, either deliberately sought out, or seemingly accidental. Travelling in unknown places is just one way of making space, leaving a door open for this other to make its presence felt. In an extreme form it can be like Inanna's journey to the underworld where everything is taken from her. But that's not the end of the story. Death is followed by transformation and rebirth.

the journey strips us of possessions -

language, context, self-importance.

Sunlight on sea and bougeainvillea,

scents of lime – here our travelling soul

feels perfectly at home

Later, I came across this quote from Albert Camus which evokes similar feelings, describing both the fear and the treasure that we find on the journey.

“.....For what gives value to travel is fear. It breaks down a kind of inner structure we have. ….......travel robs us of …..... refuge. [We are] far from our own people, our own language, stripped of all our props, deprived of our masks (one doesn't know the fare on the trams, or anything else) …...... But [we] also...... restore to every being and every object its miraculous value. A woman dancing ….... a bottle on a table, glimpsed behind a curtain: each image becomes a symbol. The whole of life seems reflected in it.....

From l'Envers et l'endroit - Amour de Vivre

And, from Nikos Kazantzakis (Odyssey – a Modern Sequel )

'My soul, your voyages have been your native land!'

The Christmas lights in Chester are already up, delicate nets of white lights strung between buildings in the narrow streets of the city centre. These lights are, of course, a celebration. But they also remind me of clusters of constellations, pinpricks of light, reflections of the night sky.

From the Shore

2011-11-16T22:49:00.009+01:00

On the 13^th November, In the Voodoo Rooms above the Café Royal in Edinburgh, the Shore Poets celebrated 20 years of existence. Poems and music by the Kitchen Stools, Jim Glen, Minnow, and Brighde Caimbeul with Jim Wilson as compère extraordinaire.

Brighde Caimbeul, Angus Peter Campbell's daughter was the star, for me, playing extraordinarily good bagpipes. It was the first time I heard her father read, and that too, was impressive.

Photo of Brighde courtesy of Fin Wycherley

Photos of all the other readers, musicians, compères and commenters can be seen here .

Ken Cockburn asked all of us current or former Shore Poets to supply a memory of past readings.

A couple of my personal favourites are below [they're anonymous so I can't credit the writers].

Those occasions in the Canon's Gait when a reading seems about to be transformed into a sonata for human voice, telephone and till, plus choral improvisations from the upstairs bar.

At the Fruitmarket Gallery, the curiously endearing sound of trains shaking the postcard stands.

Someone and I can't remember who it was, mentioned being introduced by someone, as being a member of the Shore Porters! I like this very much. It combines the idea of carrying, bearing as in the bearers of a tradition, mingling responsibility with a down to earth quality, a practical bardicness, nothing flighty or off-planet here, but a humble craft-making as well as service to the community, lightly silvered with the misty liminal quality of shore and all that that entails – blurred boundaries, shadowy outlines where the material mixes with something less tangible.

Christine de Luca, Peter Cudmore, Ian McDonough and various others have worked hard to create the CD, From the Shore, to mark the 20^th anniversary. The fantastic cover photo is by James Christie – the words and music are good too!

The poems on the CD can be read on the website, by clicking on the names listed on the right. I remember hearing Mark Ogle reading English Rain, about fifteen years ago and being struck by the poem's ability to evoke a powerful nostalgia, even then, even in someone who spends as much time as possible getting away from this climate! It has now become the literary equivalent of an icon, and evokes nostalgia in all of us. Mark died in 1999.

English Rain by Mark Ogle

I want today to close with English Rain
Tapping on my window in the four o’clock gloom.
I want Wellington boots, damp coats in a hallway
And to fight from a warm room against a screaming seawind
To the poached puddled gateways of fields
Where mud flanked cattle wait at winter’s end for hay.
I want trousers soaked to the thighs
From walking in the long grass
In fine misty rain that doesn’t fall
But fastens glistening droplets to my clothes and skin
And to listen to the sucking sounds of meadows as they drain.
I want to come home early from work in the afternoon
Because of the rain and sit with a book by the fire
And hear the words ‘Attention all shipping’,
And glimpse pale blue through broken cloud
And hear brown water running loud
Through the streets of the village
During a lull in a three day gale.

Today on this parched dusty plain
I want rain to start falling and not to stop
Until trees take such deep root, they can only turn green
As they begin to do in England now,
Thanks to the English Rain.

Uttar Pradesh, March 1980

International Day of the Imprisoned Writer

2011-11-15T22:21:00.009+01:00

The day began by helping to lift a heavy metal cage from the stage door of the Festival Theatre into the van that J and D had driven through from Glasgow. We then drove to the Scottish parliament. There was a brief discussion regarding the merits of the architecture. I like the arrangement of bundles of pale mustard coloured sticks on the front, some of them slightly warped, giving the impression of naturally curved reeds and vulnerability [though they are actually quite stout, as D discovered, when he tried to dislodge one when the policemen weren't looking]. It has to my eye a kind of makeshift appearance, something cobbled together - and of course to give that effect takes a lot of skill and contrivance.

Various quotations are carved into the stonework on one side of the building, and this one, by Alan Jackson, is one of my favourites.

We set up the cage in front of the Parliament. We found that two of the sides had become lodged together, but with the aid of a stout stick and muscle power, we managed to prise them apart. A spacious cage was then prepared for Ron Butlin, the Edinburgh Makar, who soon found himself behind bars.

The event was to draw attention to the plight of writers around the world, imprisoned because of what they have written. Many countries and political regimes do not respect human rights and freedom of expression.

Alba, the Gaelic TV channel filmed the event and interviewed Ron. A small crowd gathered. A couple of well-behaved golden haired dogs added some flashy brightness to the overcast day. But it did not rain. J had brought along a tartan tarpaulin to put over the cage, to protect the imprisoned writer, should it rain.

Several Kurdish people turned up and thanked us for making this demonstration particularly as Ragip Zarakolu a Turkish writer and publisher, has recently been arrested again in Turkey. One of them talked about how difficult it is for Kurdish people in Turkey today. He has lived in the UK for 8 years now, and he drives a taxi. He texted his friends when he heard about our event.

A couple of poems were read out, written by imprisoned writers, one of them Liu Xiaobo, who received the Noble Peace Prize last year but was unable to go to Oslo to receive it. Scottish PEN organized the creation of a special 'imprisoned writer empty chair', which flew to Oslo to be present at the Nobel Prize ceremony, symbolizing those writers unable to attend because of arrest, detention or imprisonment in their own country.

Talks at the Sauniere Society

2011-11-09T20:42:00.006+01:00

Days at Newbattle Abbey. The sun arrows through the big windows into the drawing room. Some of the shutters are closed, to reduce the amount of light coming in, so that the images can be seen clearly on the white screen. If there are images. In Sylvia Francke's talk about Rudolf Steiner, she put up a picture of the Goetheanum, the second one, at Dornoch. The first one was burnt down in a fire possibly started by people who were opposed to his ideas. This talk reminds me that Rudolf Steiner stands head and shoulders above most thinkers and seers. He combined these two remarkable qualities – profound intelligence and equally startling clairvoyant abilities. His vision also had far reaching practical applications in the fields of education and agriculture. He had ideas about social equality that were way ahead of his time. In his many books and lectures he addresses the really big questions about life – the purposes of humanity, our connections with the cosmos, how our individual life links up with these greater purposes.

In between talks there are coffee and meal breaks, and the sky is cloudless blue and the trees in the grounds are the colours of bright flames and blanched light and smouldering fires. At night, the Moon has grown plump as a ripe almond with a furred edge on one side, as if the soft outer covering over the hard shell is still there. The last unpicked gleaming almond in the night sky, the tree invisible and magical as das ringelte Klingelte Baumchen, a fairy tale tree. Some of its branches are sketched against the black sky backdrop, sprinkled with glitter stars. The Moon tilts slightly in the direction of Jupiter, the topmost star on the sky tree.

A few years ago Stephen O'Shea wrote a book about the Cathars of the Languedoc, The Perfect Heresy. His talk at the weekend focussed on his most recent book, The Friar of Carcassonne. When you're in a place that is utterly unfamiliar to you he said, and where you do not understand the language, I find the focus is on meal times. In such a situation, you're deprived of two senses – the ability to talk and to hear, or at least to make sense of what you hear around you. The senses of smell and taste become heightened and gain in importance, as if to make up for the loss of the others.

Well, that has nothing to do with the subject of his book, although it is connected with his travels while he is doing his researching. You have to go to the places you're going to write about, he said,

it's only by being in the actual places where the events happened that you'll know what the light is really like, how the landscape feels, and the effects it can have. This seems to suggest that the landscape can give you insight into how people viewed the world, how it affected these views and perceptions, and still does. It is good to hear this idea being spoken. It is good to know that others are travelling and exploring and listening to what the land, the air the sunlight, the weather, to what all of nature is saying.

I've only just got the book and haven't read it yet, but if you are interested in the Cathars, you will probably want to know more about The Friar of Carcassonne. [You can read a review here http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/the-friar-of-carcassonne-by-stephen-oshea-2369622.html ]

When it comes to landscapes, Stuart McHardy, whose talks are always fascinating, seems to have discovered or rediscovered, a perception of landscape that has regifted it with the sacred. His exploration of certain places, and the myths and stories connected with them, such as the Nine Maidens, has given him the ability so it seemed to me, to see it with the eyes of people for whom the landscape was sacred. He also has the ability to communicate the excitement of that vision to show that if we explore it with knowledge, interest, curiosity and openness to what it may reveal to us, a relationship with the land can be regained, a relationship that modern people have lost. It then becomes not so much an objective observation, where what is observed is something separate, but where the land begins to 'speak' to us. Where 'the dancer and the dance' become one. It makes me think of J, who spends so much time with the alignment of stones at Cairnholy, where the landscape responds to his openness to it and reveals itself in an ongoing conversation. A new relationship is being developed.

It makes me think of Rudolf Steiner too, and his biodynamic methods of plant cultivation, where plants are treated as living energies with individual needs, which are recognized and taken into account.

In the mornings, the grass had a crisp white covering of frost. In late afternoon, it was layered with light. At sundown, the eastern horizon was wrapped in bands of blue-green and pink.

You can find out more about the Sauniere Society here

Edward Lear in Corfu

2011-10-27T17:33:00.007+02:00

Edward Lear, talented and troubled, loving and lonely, first lived in Corfu in 1855. The weather was wet, Lear suffered from attacks of epilepsy and depression and for a while could not work at his sketching and painting. When spring made an early appearance and he got to know more people and started selling his drawings, his mood and outlook also improved. He began to explore the island and in a letter to his sister Ann he wrote “The hills are positively an immense crop of geraniums all gold colour - & in the olive woods, the large white heath looks like snow & the pale lilac asphodels in such profusion as to seem like a sort of pale veil over all the ground.”

He was a restless man. His perceptions fluctuated, turning a fresh and expansive outlook into a cold and shrunken territory. But when he travelled, no matter how difficult the journey might be, simply to be in movement released the feeling of impoverishment of the senses and emotions, it lit up the landscape of possibility, like a shaft of sunlight.

In 1848/9 he had travelled through mainland Greece and Albania, sketching and painting. His Journal of a Landscape Painter in Albania makes fascinating reading, in its detailed descriptions of the lives of a people little known to the English speaking world. It is also full of Lear's witty and sometimes self-deprecating comments.

He left Corfu after two years because he wanted to make a journey to the Holy Land, though he returned in 1860 and lived there until 1864 when the British protectorate ended and Corfu and the other Ionian Islands became part of Greece.

The house where he lived in the 1860s was very close to Prosforou, where I lived earlier this year, and a poem about him, and a picture of the house can be found on Catapult to Mars.

Thanks to Corfu blues for the image above of Lear's painting of Paleokastritza, Corfu.

Edward Lear: The Corfu Years - A Chronicle presented through his Letters and Journals

There is also an excellent biography of Lear by Vivien Noakes

House of Exile - an Appreciation

2011-10-17T23:05:00.007+02:00

Evelyn Juers – House of Exile

This is what biography should be! This book pushes you deep into the consciousness of the time by its descriptions of the lives of individuals.

The main characters are the writer Heinrich Mann and his wife Nelly Kröger-Mann. [photo of Heinrich and Nelly, courtesy of http://www.muenchner-stadtbibliothek.de] Other members of the Mann family put in frequent appearances particularly his brother, the Nobel prize-winning Thomas and his son Klaus, and a host of other writers, including James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Bertolt Brecht, Robert Musil, Walter Benjamin, Lion Feuchtwanger, Jakob Wassermann and many others. It takes us through the thirties and the rise of fascism in Europe, and the war years.

What has often irked me about biographies is a tone that can sometimes slip into the critical or judgemental – how easy I think, to look at another's life, one that, presumably, is admired [why else write about them?] and see 'flaws' in their character or decisions they made. Evelyn Juers has managed very cleverly I think, and after a huge amount of research, to get inside the lives of her main characters. She does this partly by quoting their letters and journals, partly through magnificent writing where she does not signal her presence by waving opinions or interpretations, though does sometimes say things like - I imagine her walking down the Kurfurstendamn etc. So that we feel as if we are experiencing events through the eyes of the people described. And there is no hint of judgement, but rather, great compassion, which is not overtly stated, but in which the whole book is steeped, like a colour, a subtle scent or flavour, the kind of light which is only found in a certain place, whether geographical or psychological.

What sticks in my mind is that boat full of Jewish refugees fleeing Hitler's Germany crossing the Atlantic and being turned away from the USA. Having to go back across the Atlantic and as the author said, probably ending up in the camps. The way that the French collaborationist government helped to seek out German residents in France, who were then sent back to Germany and to the concentration camps. The way all the German resident exiles had to apply for visas to the USA and exit permits from France. And if you knew someone in the USA already, it made it at least more possible. How many writers committed suicide. How Virginia and Leonard Woolf had a suicide plan ready, should the UK succumb. The way Heinrich [then nearly seventy] and the others with him had to climb over the Pyrenees to escape to Spain. And how the Nazis in pursuit reached Cerbère near the French-Spanish border a day later – they were just in time. The relentless pressure, anxiety, fear for oneself and one's loved ones. No wonder people turned to alcohol, and came to rely on morphine, barbiturates and other drugs, as they tried to sleep at nights.

The suicide toll goes on and on. People still in Germany who had been arrested, or knew they were about to be, those who lived in France or Prague or other European cities, after France's capitulation and collaboration with Germany. People who were trying to escape but did not manage it, like Walter Benjamin on the Spanish border, taking the same route that Heinrich and Nelly took. He did not have a French exit visa and was refused entry into Spain. A few weeks earlier he wrote in a letter - the complete uncertainty about what the next day and even the next hour will bring has dominated my existence for many weeks. Like so many of the refugees he carried a lethal dose of morphine tablets with him, and took these rather than return to France.

Thomas Mann's journals and letters are often quoted. It's clear from them that he never liked Nelly, Heinrich's wife, considering her 'common'. After her death – she had problems with alcohol, other health problems, and eventually took her own life – Thomas Mann says 'she caused him [Heinrich] a lot of trouble.' She also cooked for him, looked after him, typed up his manuscripts, went out to work and took on menial jobs in the USA to support both of them, and clearly loved him. She was described by others as 'a ray of sunshine', and 'the kindest person I ever met'. Heinrich was devastated by her death, and particularly remembered her courage and how she helped him when they were escaping over the Pyrenees into Spain.

So relevant to our own times too, as many refugees from various wars and oppressive regimes continue to seek asylum, escaping from horrors quite unimaginable to us, who live in freedom and relative security.

You can find the Guardian review here

Back Roads and Magic Carpets

2011-10-02T21:57:00.009+02:00

What is the name of these fair wondrous plants, now somewhat withered, past the fullness of their blossoming, and appearing as with the colours of clouds near the horizon at the setting of the sun with a faint whisper of pink in their feathery aspect, like plumes of some exotic bird, scattered by the roadside?

These may not be the exact words of my companion, but that's how I remember them, more or less, with perhaps a faint inserted echo of Chaucerian English, which somehow I associate with him, at least in my imagination.

(Answer to his question – rosebay willowherb)

We're driving through hills of an extraordinary colour, part-russet from bracken part purple from heather – all in this low sunlight, a summer day slipped into autumn like a surprise thin packet, tied with a ribbon of many colours, a glitter of silk, a slim wedge of shiny paper, with the resulting startling yellows and deep reds of trees glowing among the shades of green. There's also the statuesque profiles of windfarms and we discuss the possibility of painting them rainbow hues, to shed colour on the hillsides, on grey winter days.

It's open day for artists' studios in and around Dunbar. We first visit Lesleymay Miller's and Judith Rowan's in a basement in Church Street. JR notices things - he points out a lobster creel in the garden which I would have failed to see otherwise. I tend to look into the distance, to horizons. Lobster creels and pink roses.

A band playing traditional jazz music can be heard off the High Street, where we go for coffee to the 1650 café. We decide it is so named because that was the time when coffee houses first made their appearance.

We then drive to Stanton, following a narrow country road through velvety corn coloured fields – the road lined with beech-hedges, pale green and yellow tinted – the low sunlight shines in my eyes and I pull down the sun visor. JR looks at the map. I circle a roundabout a couple of times then find the right road. There is no wind and the sunlight laps over the land, in peaceful unhurried waves.

Aliki Sapountzi's photographs are of Turkey and Afghanistan. The tomb of Shah Abbas. Stony landscapes. Deep blue skies. It seems to me that if you have travelled in a particular landscape then a part of you belongs to it and it is somehow always inside of you so that you are then part of it, inseparable. Seeing images of these places reminds you of that other part of you that's also you. This is the way I feel connected to the photographs of Afghanistan. It then seems inexplicable that I should be here, when I feel this connection, shiny as copper, stony and dusty as the tracks and mountains, deep blue as the sky – with this other land. Its minerals I feel, part of my hands and fingernails. Lapis in the veins. Turquoise around the finger joints. Bowl of sky like a loose blue scarf around my neck.

I don't have photographs from that time but I remember the deep silence at night, so many moving points of light, stars in the night sky. It's as if there is another perceptive self, one that doesn't always see the lobster pots, may not register the present details but carries its own memory imprint, that returns in feeling like a soft and subtle cloak and its language is more one of shifting light, colours, and the slopes, curves and hollows of landscape.

Its terrain unfolds, it rolls out like a carpet when I see images of that remembered land. Look! it says – step onto this carpet and walk over the thick wool, feel the worn places and the ridges underneath your feet - and it turns into the vegetation and the dust of this land. As if I'm walking in another being's footsteps – smell the baking bread, in the mountain air...

(Images of Afghanistan courtesy of wikipedia)

Athens and Acharnon Street

2011-09-17T20:56:00.014+02:00

(Because the cover of John Lucas's book is in splendid black and white, I decided as an experiment, to make all the images in this post monochrome. Is it my imagination or does this give the feeling of going back in time?)

When I picked up John Lucas's 92 Acharnon street, A Year in Athens I first read it as Acheron and I think immediately of passing the Acheron when I was on the bus from Igoumenitza to Athens, or at least there was a sign pointing to it though I didn't actually see the river. Seeing this sign reminded me that the geographical landscape of Greece is also the home of the gods on Olympus and the home too of Hades, with the river Acheron leading to the underworld.

The ancient world is still right here, mingling with the modern one and nowhere is it more apparent than in the Plaka district of Athens, city still of light, with its narrow cobbled streets around the Acropolis. The evening we arrived I went with S and her family, taking the gleaming new metro from Neos Cosmos to Akropoli and walking through the warm streets, ending up in the Bajraktari restaurant.

The following day R and I took the metro again, and I went to the new Acropolis museum, a shiny and spacious building, full of partial and complete statues or koroi – Athena, with her snake-hemmed robes, many centaurs, often fighting with men - lions and bulls in conflict and elegant horses with trimmed manes.

I later set out to go up to the Parthenon but it was closed, there was a strike that day. So I walked around the acropolis in the sunshine, under a clear blue sky. Climbed some rocks where there was a view of the creamy city, bordered by straight cypresses, unmoving in the still air.

I've only read a few pages of 92 Acharnon Street so far, but it is difficult to put down. To read about other places is for me, second only to actually being in other places.

Take his description of his apartment block

“Acrid fumes of cheap petrol and diesel, the hot smells of abraded rubber and brake shoes slammed against wheel rims, all drifted up from the traffic-clogged road on which my apartment block stood.”

and of Acharnon Street -

“A six lane highway heading straight into the city centre, it was as busy at three am as at 3 o'clock in the afternoon. All night long queues of nose-to-tail cars, lorries, coaches, taxis and motorbikes filled Acharnon Street, howling to a sudden halt (there was a set of traffic lights almost outside my window) blurting horns when red turned to green......and then they'd career towards the next set of lights under a haze of exhaust fumes, tyres screeching...... “

This reminds me of stepping out of the bus station at Athens after travelling all day from Corfu. It was dark by the time we arrived and I went out of the bus station by the same exit that we had come in, weeks earlier, when we'd been given a lift there by friends of S. But this was clearly only a dropping off point, for there was only a narrow pavement, no sign of any buses stopping here, and a huge multi-lane highway was covered in roaring fast-moving traffic.

If heaven is a place where you experience a feeling of belonging, then this roaring mechanical stream of traffic with bright headlights and red tail lights, sweeping past you, not just oblivious to your existence but something that would quickly put an end to it and not even notice, were you to step out into its lethal current – this surely had to be the underworld. Not a river of water but a grinding roar which, while the cars were driven by human beings, took no account of the fragility of human existence. I went back into the bus station, wondering how other people managed

to find a way out, and that was when I discovered another exit. Which meant I managed to escape into the more human friendly metro from Omonia to Neos Cosmos, and walked from there to E's apartment.

Because the author, John Lucas, is in Athens to teach a course in English literature, the book is also full of references to some of my favourites, Cavafy, Byron, Olivia Manning's Balkan Trilogy and Levant Trilogy, and even gossip from people who had met her, her husband and some of the other people from whom the characters depicted in her books are derived. Already in the first two chapters, the amazing hospitality of the Greeks, their love of life, their ways of adapting to a tortuous bureaucratic system, all has been revealed, with moving and humorous precision. I can't wait to read more.

The Path to Morges - Part 2

2011-09-15T23:14:00.006+02:00

The first part of my journey is downhill, towards the village of Etoy. This feeling of assisted movement, assisted by the downward slope towards the lakeside, supports the delightful illusion that I am going somewhere, I am doing something, even though it's clear I'm doing very little and much less than I will do later, puffing and pedalling up the hill. Nevertheless, gradient is a powerful creator of illusion and as I speed downhill, the air rushing past me donates a joyous lightness, a magical sensation of near-flight, a feathery experience, where it is clear that air is a very solid and muscular medium which if we could only see it, contains eddies and whirlpools, curves and plumes and fantastic spiral and torus patterns.

We can see these only in the visible forms caught up in the air's playful game – like the dried leaves in the yard which suddenly swirl into patterns, with some of them rising upwards, still circling, forming a cone, with one or two escaping out of the top of the cone, then drifting like birds, floating, moving neither up nor down, before slipping downwards, the animating hand in the glove that spun them round, abruptly withdrawn.

Swept on and almost upwards by this illusion I follow a road to St Prex then explore a path that soon leads away from the road. First it runs parallel to the motorway, close enough to hear the traffic and glimpse the flashing vehicles from time to time. Then the trail turns off and twists among vineyards with clumps of tender green and purple grapes nestling modestly between the wide and flashy fingers of the leaves. All the rows of vines are trimmed to a precise height, so that they look like thin lanes of topiary, pale green and lustrous corn-rows, immaculately braided. Some of them have rose-bushes at the end of rows, like guardian or stopping posts, with flashes of pink and yellow blooms.

I follow this unknown trail as it skirts a river then sidles round a mansion, with outhouses. An invisible dog barks. A few kilometres and turnings later the path passes underneath a railway bridge, then comes out onto a main road. I cross the road and only about 200 metres further on, there's the sign saying vin et fruits à vendre.

I know exactly where I am now, know I can slip off the road and follow a path that winds through the wood beside the lake, whose waves splash rhythmically against the shore. I feel triumphant. I've avoided the small towns of Bouchillon and St Prex, avoided the main road almost entirely, shortened the journey and made it much more pleasant, riding through the fields and woods and the feeling of success is as heady as the scented air. I am one of the topmost leaves, swirled upwards by the wind, wafted in scents of roses, pine resin and lake water.

The track continues through the woods then passes near the parking area on the outskirts of Morges, finally going through a park where a river sidles towards the lake and ducks sail, like squat brown unhurried leaves. Pedestrian bridges cross the river and there are paths and grassy areas, trimmed bushes and swept walkways and a tranquil atmosphere. The lane continues beside the castle and so we enter the town of Morges.

The Path to Morges - Part 1

2011-09-13T21:30:00.007+02:00

The Path to Morges

(written at Lavigny, Switzerland)

I press the button that opens the garage door. It always surprises me that this sheet-metal, lethal as an executioner, should be so obedient. First of all it moves outwards, just a little, towards me, as if to remind me of just what it could do, should it choose to. But it does not. It slides up and back with a monotonous grating sound. I'm always nervous at first but by the time it's about half way up I begin to trust that it will not lunge suddenly at me, with its metal edge, sharpened in the night to a razor alertness, and inflict damage before I can back away. Like a trained lion it goes through its paces.

Inside the garage, I kick the bike-stand, so that it lies smoothly against the wheel-side, push the bike out into the courtyard. The garage roof has mostly brick-red tiles, though a few have speckles of grey and beige lichen on them. Whether these are genuine lichen or some of those modern, pre-weathered tiles you can buy ready-stained at Monsieur Bricolage, I really do not know. I have not been able to examine them closely enough. But I imagine they've been bought, pre-aged and pre-stained, rather than allowing moss or lichen to grow between the cracks in tiles, spread and cover them unevenly with their curving, crusting delicate patterns bleaching and discolouring the tiles in their typical and rather graceful – so I think – fashion.

The other day I saw the daughter of the store-owners, standing with a long-handled implement some kind of hoe, I imagine, pushing its blade down between the carefully-laid zig-zag paving, to eradicate the non-existent weeds. This kind of vigilance I feel, could not allow stray lichen to create its segments of frilled mandala patterns to spread across roof tiles.

On the other side of the garage there is a tree, whose name I do not know, but who I converse with, every time I look from the balcony across the courtyard, to the garage roof. The tree soars above the roof, its glossy leaves a deep, plum-red colour, the shade of near-maroon, before the plums turn purple. Next to it is one of these bronze-leafed trees, between dark copper and green – a kind of burnished green, as if its leaves have been dipped in clear caramel, then allowed to dry into a matt varnish.

A few dry leaves make prickly scuttling sounds on windy days, when the broom-wind chases them around in circles, like naughty, untidy children. But actually, it is a game I feel, for once the leaves have huddled into a tidy heap, they break loose again and scatter across the yard.

The first part of my journey is downhill......

.......and Rodin

2011-08-27T21:51:00.008+02:00

At the Musée Rodin

Rodin makes waves of feeling pulse through bronze. Despair and grief edge out - as these feelings do - in throbs. Love on the other hand, slides like water, fissured with light. There's the unpeeled face of parting, which dissolves both masks and heavier emotions. There is the vulnerability of carrying burdens, the weight, exhaustion, determination – and our understanding of it oh yes, we know this feeling perhaps better than any other for it lingers and sweeps a wide space around it, just as someone's hair can fly out and touch you, evoke memories – love, loss, joy – in that briefest of moments, that spills a bag of memories onto the ground, which you are still gathering long after the head that carries the long hair has disappeared into another room, laughing with her companion.

"from this body and from the object which it touches or seizes something new originates, a new thing that has no name and belongs to no one."

From Rilke's Sur Rodin

(translated by Jessie Lamont and Hans Trausil, 1919).

(You can read the lengthy quote this brief one is taken from, at The Alchemist's Pillow).

There is the movement, not contained within the metal, but given life by it. In Rodin's garden one of the group of the Burghers of Calais has her head in her hands, her face half covered as she is looking down. As I stand a little way back from it, a woman goes up close, almost needing to stand underneath the sculpted figure, to glimpse the expression on the bronze features. To see more clearly she puts her hands up to her head, to keep her hair away from her eyes, so nothing would obscure her view. For a few seconds the two of them – living woman and bronze sculpture – hold almost the same pose – the bronze woman looking down, the living one looking up.

Rilke spent time here early in the last century, when he worked for Rodin, and wrote his book Sur Rodin. I was hoping to find Rilke in the garden but there were far too many people there, for the poet who talks so eloquently of the need for solitude. Possibly he spends the summer months at the castle Duino near Trieste, where he wrote his Duino Elegies, preferring the lonely cliff tops. Maybe in the winter he visits this garden, where he used to spend time, when working for Rodin. Yet I have the feeling that even then, he would rather be taking the solitary paths by the Adriatic, where he would look down on the sea.

Rilke as Pierre Assouline says, was the authentic wanderer, clearly needing that kind of freedom. In our age this can be viewed as slightly perverse, not in the usual mould of life, disquieting to those who flourish on the accumulation of fixity as if it was a virtuous endeavour. Challenged perhaps by a difference in behaviour, feeling its lightness and freedom cast a shadow on them, there's a suggestion that such a way of life however raw, painful or real it is to those that live it, does not face up to things, 'escapes' from things [what things might these be?] and generally wriggles out of the kind of suit they wear, heavy, cumbersome, restricting.

But Rilke had indeed made something of himself – he turned himself into what life is made from and made for – the honey tastes, the experience of beyondness – beyond the daily, the quotidien, beyond even, what we mean by self – glimpses into the ineffable, delirious with what we've tasted – and passed on. We are the bees of the invisible, Rilke said – we gather collect and offer nectar – in words perhaps, in colours, and in bronze.

Rodin created his wandering in a different way. He wrestled his form of vision into a different cast of honey – but it is all honey, one shade or another, one comb, one weave one whisper scent or note of music – or another. Rodin too moved from one love to another. Yet his behaviour as far as I know, was not seen as reprehensible as he had a 'stable family life'. The restless man with no home of his own is seen as much more suspect. And I wonder why.

Rilke and....

2011-08-23T22:59:00.006+02:00

Pierre Assouline writing in Rilke à l’écoute de la mélodie des choses describes him as cet authentique SDF dont on a pu dire qu’il fut le poète de l’indomiciabilité. [that authentic wanderer who could well be described as the poet of rootlessness (non domicileability or inability to settle in one place).

J saw one of his books the other day when we were passing the bouquinistes by the Seine and pounced on it. His Lettres à un Jeune Poete. Have you read this she asks me. Well, I say, I've read bits of it, quotations.....But you have to read it all, she says, you must …. I'm going to buy it for you. And so she does, slipping the cellophane wrapped treasure into my bag.

The following day I spend a long time in a bookshop on St. Michel. There are so many tempting books but I'm looking for one in particular. First of all I go to the littérature étranger, because what I'm looking for has been translated from Italian. But it isn't there. There are other sections too, recent translations from various other countries, and one that goes the length of one side of the shop and continues along another, Livres de Poche, also translated from other languages. Livres de poches are smaller more popular editions. I feel its so unlikely that what I'm looking for will have been brought out under a popular imprint that I hesitate. Then decide to look, walking along the shelves until I come to M. It took me a while to realise that what I was looking at was, really was, the book I was searching for. The sole and singular copy, clearly, waiting for me. Melania Mazzucco's Elle, tant aimée. (She was greatly loved). This is a novel based on the life of Annemarie Shwarzenbach, and I'm grateful to J for letting me know of its existence in the first place. And the title - turns out to be a quotation from Rilke.

…...celle

qui recut tant d'amour que d'une seule lyre

plus de plainte jaillit que de mille pleureuses,

et que naquit pour elle un monde fait de plainte,

où tout fut a nouveau: les forêts et vallées,

villages et chemins, bêtes, fleuves et champs.

Et ce monde de plainte eut aussi un soleil

tournant autour de lui comme autour de la terre,

avec un ciel silencieux et remplit d'astres,

un ceil de plainte aux étoiles défigurées -

pour elle, tant aimée.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Orphée, Eurydice, Hermès

….the one

who evoked so much love that from a single lyre

more lamentation poured out than from a thousand weeping mourners,

so much, that a world was born out of this lamentation for her,

and everything was recreated there : forests and valleys,

villages and paths, animals, rivers and fields.

And this lamenting world had its own sun

turning around it as ours does around the earth,

its own silent sky, filled with stars,

a mourning sky, its stars distorted with loss

of her, so beloved

[my unpolished translation]

A Year with Rilke blog gives a daily quotation – as well as superb images from Vincent van Gogh, Marc Chagall and others ….

La Canicule....and Lomalakane

2011-08-21T22:58:00.005+02:00

Last night there was a storm, lots of lightning flashes, a few cracks of thunder and then torrential rain. This morning it was still cloudy when I went out walking, and took a different route to the Seine. It even rained a little but it was still so warm that it was not in the least inconvenient and I could not help thinking about the kind of rain we had in Scotland recently and comparing it to this. On the way back, the sun came out and it got steadily hotter.

Yesterday was cloud free and hot all day but today the temperature ascended into the truly tropical and sticky. I can gauge the temperature roughly by the amount I need to drink and the water levels that course down my face. But even I was surprised to see a flashing sign that announced a temperature of 38 degrees. I think that was perhaps an exaggerating sign but it could not have been too wildly imaginative. This evening reminds me of summers in Albania, when I have to keep wiping the sweat off my face.

It's difficult to portray in images the blistering quality of the heat. The first picture is of trees in the Jardin George Brassens, where I lay down for a while. It was so hot after that that I was not thinking about taking pictures. Except when I saw this street performer, who mimed and did dance steps and acrobatic things with his hat and his cane, with background music. He was particularly popular with children – and me. Or perhaps I should say plage performer as this is only a few steps away from the Paris plage, an area that's been covered in sand so that people can imagine that they're at the beach. There is a vital ingredient missing – for me anyway – in this beach experience and that is water. You may be by the Seine but you can't actually go in.

Mister Slyde, the performer, also known as Lomalakane i.e. l'homme à la canne, the man with the walking stick, is described as a former gymnast and acrobat and for the last ten years has collaborated with various well-known choreographers and dancers and is also the inventor of Lyr'x, a type of dance discipline based on the art of manipulation of a stick, which he also teaches. He's been called the modern day Chaplin. But you don't have to be on Paris plage to see him you can watch videos of him here.

Continuation of a Water Theme

2011-08-17T10:53:00.008+02:00

The sun blazes on the city streets, after I've spent hours in the Gibert Joseph bookshop on Saint Michel. I walk up to the garden next to the Musée Cluny, where I find a little water pump next to the public toilets. You have to turn around the knob at the top, making a circular motion, and it then emits a gush of water. I try to catch it [for I forgot today, to bring a bottle of water with me] and though most of it escapes my cupped hands, still, I manage to swallow a couple of mouthfuls.

I walk on along the Boulevard Saint Germain, until I come to the Institut du Monde Arabe which K had recommended. You'll hear plenty of oriental music there he said, but today, there is no-one outside playing music. I want to stay in the sunshine so I don't go in. I walk back a little way along the quai, past the bouquinistes and then go down to the river. I have never walked along here before, and that's the astonishing thing about Paris, I've been here so many times, but there are still so many parts of it I'm placing my feet on for the first time.

Barges are lightly tethered to the river bank. L'Heure Bleue, The Blue Hour, in the photo, is a more unusual one. The wakes of the tourist boats slide away against the walls, leaving the Seine-surface rippling and dancing, greeny grey. This bridge - which I think is the Pont de Sully – is wrapped in a beige covering and parts of it swell and ripple as a breeze passes over it. Other parts seem stretched tight, motionless. Grey tubes emerge from this covering and wrap themselves over the bridge like a hungry life-form, bridge-gnawers, bridge-fondlers.

A bateau mouche, wide and low, an elegant two-tiered cake, with a red and white striped awning over the lower level, slides underneath the bridge. Bateau-mouche? I think about this word, for the first time. A boat-fly? Is it so called because it skims the surface of the water? Or because of its speed? And why are the two lights above the bridge arch always red? Two feux rouges, one below the other, that never change. The traffic on the river continues, does not hesitate when faced with these red lights. The water is olive green, glistening like polished skin.

Further along the quayside, someone sitting on a flight of steps plays a muted melancholy saxophone. I walk up the steps and go through the Jardin des Plantes. Emerging on the other side, on the rue Geoffroy Saint Hilaire, there is another water pump.

Following this street, I come out onto the rue des Gobelins, walk up to Place d'Italie and on to la Butte aux Cailles, where I go into the piscine, to ask about their opening hours. It seems that you can swim anytime between 11 in the morning and 9 in the evening. But I didn't bring my swimsuit with me. You can buy one here I'm told. And a – casquette, I say, guessing the word and gesturing around my head. Bonnet, he smiles. I'm not swimming today, I've walked for hours and I'm heading home. But it's good to know it's possible.

A Water Theme

2011-08-12T23:49:00.007+02:00

It was raining so hard yesterday that just getting to St John's Church in Edinburgh was quite an adventure in itself. First of all, going to the road through the woods the small stream had overflowed onto the path, so I had to squelch through it.

At the church, brave wet people came in, shaking umbrellas. JP turned up and taught us all a song. It's a song for a rainy day he said. The tune came to him in a dream he told me later, after he'd been watching an alignment of the planets earlier this year, at Cairnholy.

I read poems about travel and the journey – through various different parts of the world. Sandy Hutchison read his work on places in Italy and Scotland and Lesley Harrison read short poems about birds, and a sequence from travelling in Mongolia, where she used to live.

After the reading J and I go for a walk along a path heading for the botanical gardens. At the end of the path the river, the Water of Leith, has spilled over its banks and the road is completely submerged.

We go round by the wall, where it's only a few inches deep, cross the road beyond the water and I want to go further along the path by the river even though there is a temporary gate blocking off the path and saying it's closed. J pulls the gate back and we slip through. The river is deep and brown, frothing and surging and very close to the top of the wall that separates it from the houses just beyond. Sandbags are piled behind the wall. A sign declares that the flood prevention scheme is in operation. The bottom of the sign is underwater. The path too further on, is underwater.

We climb up the bank which is covered in very wet ivy-like undergrowth. Here and there a soggy branch to clutch, to pull us up, but mostly it's steep and slippy mud. But I do not want to slip, with the surging frothy river waiting to break our fall. But of course we do slip, first J and later I do, and though we help each other up I'm not sure if we're pulling each other up or dragging each other down. Besides it's hard to breathe, we're laughing so much. J's light trousers and my white skirt are caked in mud.

Back onto the path where it re-emerges from the water, we see an interesting sign for the Swim Centre. At the end of the path we walk back by the road. Near the car, a swan emerges from a nearby pond, and walks slowly along the road. A second one follows it. I feel slightly alarmed at the swans walking down the road. At the end is the main street in Stockbridge, full of traffic. But they are clearly determined. Near the end of the road I am very pleased to see that they turn left into the playing fields. Here we are says J, fretting about them and it's probably their daily walk.

Lists, Doodles and Friendly Creatures

2011-08-10T21:37:00.006+02:00

It's a time for drawing up lists, in the run up to going away again. So my mind arranges everything in strict list-like formation, with fragments of runaway doodles, images and sketches from the past few days.

Too many to write about but a few come to mind – like the large pinkish coloured bull in the field, ring in his nose, eyes closed as he chews the cud. I am on my bicycle on a minor back road and I've already encountered other cattle, not fenced off but wandering across the roadway. I check out the cattle – most of them are cows but one is a bull so I climb over the fence and walk along in the field, pushing my bike on the road side of the fence until I've passed him. The bull scarcely looks at me, is really not interested in me at all, at least rarely seems to be looking in my direction on the few occasions when I find the courage to look at him. I berate myself for being a coward but that's just how I am. A stubborn coward though, determined not to curtail my bike ride just because there is a bull at the side of the road.

I used not to have any fear of bulls. As a child, holidaying once in a caravan by the sea, with a field full of cows and a bull just next to the site, I wandered over to the Hereford bull which was sitting there peaceably. I stroked his curly white forehead and he seemed to like that. Years later my mother told me that she had seen me from the caravan window and was riveted with horror. I didn't know what to do she said, if I called out to you, I was afraid that might disturb the bull so I just stood there and watched, frozen with fear. But he was a peaceable bull and besides, I knew him, or thought I did, and he had never ever been known to be bad tempered. I think of this of course, as I struggle to push my bike along. It's these unknown bulls I think, the ones I am not acquainted with, that I feel wary of.

The second bull, the one with the ring in his nose, is in a fenced off field, so I have no fear of him. Still, I pedal very quietly past him, because his eyes are closed and I do not want to disturb him, he looks so content.

The other evening, sitting in the living room, with back door and kitchen door open, I hear a slight clicking scuttling sound in the kitchen. I think it must be the neighbour's cat which has wandered in, as he sometimes does. But when I look up, standing in the living room doorway is a young hedgehog, looking amazed, boggle-eyed, disbelieving. When I get up very slowly, not wanting to startle it, it scuttles back into the kitchen and outside again. Hedgehogs can move surprisingly quickly.

Earlier today, I walk along the grassy path to my friend JR's house. It is in a valley with only one other house in view. A narrow path is mown through the tall grasses. Fronds lean over into the cut path, stroking damp fingers over my jeans. The sun shines, though wanly, through misty clouds. And a fine rain is falling. It is a curious mixture, this pale sunshine and fine rain. The small guardian gargoyle grins in front of the door. (In a former life, this building was a church). The atmosphere is soaked with rain and peace.

Very different from the jubilant and busy city, crammed with festival goers, people dressed in colourful costumes, and a piper with unusual feet. I will be back in the city tomorrow, 11th August, reading in St John's church hall. Edinburgh. Then ticking the final things off my list, before getting on a long-distance coach.

I've also put up a post on the new Scottish Pen blog, about Chateau Lavigny, the writers residency in Switzerland.

I wake up in heaven, very early....

2011-07-30T00:34:00.006+02:00

My friends arrange for me to stay at the Morska Perla hotel in Nesebar old town. Only the bus from Sofia drops me in the new town and no-one I ask has heard of this hotel. It's behind the post office I'm told but there's no hotels there, just rather ugly modern buildings. The tourist office helps. It's in the old town he says, gives me the address, points it out on the map. I walk along the narrow strip of land separating new town from old, and find the hotel. The woman is all smiles and laughter and the room is palatial – and with a balcony!

Next morning I wake up in heaven, very early. The sun comes through the windows and blinds of Morska Perla's spacious suite. Yesterday I walked right round the promontory and found that the small beach is actually very close to my smart residence. An old ruined church overlooks this beach of small stones. I wade into the water. On my way back to the hotel I walk past the marina. After morning coffee, I pick up my swimwear and towel, and head back along the narrow strip of land between old and new town, and then further along the new town coast, to the small beach, sandy, and packed with people. The waves rise up and lift you up, reminding me of the beach at North Carolina, long ago. I send off postcards – if not to the past, then – to the memories of past.

Just behind the beach, hotel complexes cram the little bay, jammed together – nothing sticks so hard it seems, as commerce, gain, a tough adhesive. But I am the luckiest in the world, for I wake in the shadow of ancient buildings, history lays its finger on the narrow streets where seagulls call, and a thin white cat stalks its morning territory. Even before the souvenir shops are open, before the cafés and the post office is open, the Byzantine churches have been blessed by the sun coming up over the sea. And the beach of small stones to myself. And the morning marina, of empty boats. My patronne greets me with a smile and coffee. Dobre? She asks. Dobre, I say.

The Poetry Society

2011-07-28T10:18:00.002+02:00

Recent articles in the Times and the Guardian may have left some people bemused as to what has been happening recently at the Poetry Society. For an excellent, clear sighted summary of recent events, including statements from some of the people concerned, the website of the members of the Poetry Society is here. There has also been an equally insightful analysis on George Szirtes site here, where you can find other useful links. George has initiated a petition calling for the reinstatement of the Director.

This is important, not just for members of the Poetry Society or for writers and readers of poetry, but for everyone concerned with issues of transparency and fairness in any organization. It raises the issues of how organizations are managed and how a Board of Trustees are in positions of trust and are accountable to their members, and what can happen when democratic procedures are not followed.

This kind of disconnection can happen in an employment situation, between employers and employees, between boards and members, between governments and citizens, which is why we have laws and procedures to protect members whether of a Society or society in general – and why, ultimately, we have the Declaration of Human Rights to enshrine these protective measures. So this is not just some storm in a delicate bone china teacup not some 'personality clash', but addresses a fundamental principle of fairness and openness. This principle is a bedrock of the larger society, democratic and open, where we are kept informed, where we have the opportunity to have our say, which we are fortunate enough to be part of. But we may also need to defend this principle, if necessary.

Sofia Old and New

2011-07-17T14:11:00.010+02:00

They say that if you were born blind and later have an operation which enables vision, what you see at first is a disorienting swirling mass of colour. It takes time to learn to make sense of what your eyes are seeing. For sight is no mere visual reception – this sense perception also organizes and interprets.

Seeing a place for the first time is a little like a new gift of sight. Everything around you is full of sound scent and colour, but you have no background or context to place it in. The advantage though, is that you see everything with fresh eyes.

In Sofia I saw a demonstration, with people banging drums, blowing whistles, waving Bulgarian and EU flags. 'Protect' was written on one banner. Some people climbed onto a statue of a man on a horse in front of the National Assembly. One of these people talked through a loudspeaker and every so often a cheer went through the crowd, like a wave cresting and falling. Policemen stood at the end of Tsar Osvoboditel Boulevard, making it clear it was blocked off to traffic. They wear dark uniforms, with pill-box hats like French gendarmes. Some of them wore long-sleeved jackets. They must, I thought, be feeling the heat.

Immediately I arrived in Sofia I felt at home in the small streets off Rakovski. Peeling façades of old buildings, sycamore and lime trees throwing dappled shadow patterns on dusty streets. Of course, there is the city centre with its beautiful churches and grand new buildings. There is the

modern statue of Sofia herself, with an owl, the bird of wisdom, perched on her arm. But the small streets, for me, hold the real history, the humanity, the way people live.

After a meal chez P and R, P accompanies me back to my hostel, near the train station. It's late, but P says he thinks there may still be a bus. As we wait in the soft night, the last tram comes along. We get on. P asks the driver if since it's going to the depot, it takes the same route. It does. When we get off, we walk alongside the tiny river, forced into a canal in the way the Lana is in Tirana. And there are big bridges here too with sloping sides down to the tiny trickle of water. We cross at the Lion Bridge, through the silent, empty streets.

Mitteleuropa

2011-07-08T22:56:00.023+02:00

Keleti train station, Budapest

I'd made a reservation at a hostel in Budapest near Keleti train station. Off the busy main street, you pass through two doors and then into an inner courtyard. There are hardly any traffic sounds at all.

I wake in the morning to the faint sound of trams. There is something about Mitteleuropa that I recognize, it feels familiar. It is a sense that's all, like the feeling of sunlight in early morning, touching a place that you are aware has been touched before. It has no name, just this recognition, like a friend you haven't seen for some time and it's not that you'd forgotten this person but rather, that you'd been preoccupied with other things, as if our lives have several concurrent tracks or as if we are a whole system of Ways, we are the network rather than just one branch line, but this one line has been our focus for some time so we have come to identify with it. We have localized our perception and identity but at such times of recognition it's clear that the geography of who we are is so much bigger than our usual local streets. Travelling is not just visiting external places but revisiting parts of ourselves too.

Poetry I feel, takes this for granted. It can spring up anywhere and has no need of explanation. It has an immediacy like an outstretched hand. Not so much simply a response to a place or a feeling, but part of an ongoing uninterrupted communication. Here I am, here is my hand.

And you take the hand of the place you are in. How could you not?

Erzsebetvaros so I read, with surprise and delight, is named after Elizabeth, Empress of Austria. The delight is similar to meeting up unexpectedly with an old friend. Well known in continental Europe, her name meant nothing to me until a few months ago, when I visited the Achilleon in Corfu. It was she who had this grand mansion built in honour of Achilles. Elizabeth was married to the Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph but she was not someone who enjoyed court life and stayed away as much as possible. She had a fondness for Hungary and spoke the language fluently. She was influential in the re-establishment of the Hungarian constitution which led to the Austrian Empire becoming the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary.

Clearly her feelings for the Hungarian people were reciprocated, as this street and the area around it, has been named after her. It is off Rakoczi, and leads into the old Jewish quarter of Pest. This is when the city comes alive for me, in these narrow little streets. It's also when the feeling of familiarity is strongest.

These are the streets where Robert Capa, born Andre Friedman, was born and grew up, and where he first became a photographer. Obliged to flee Hungary because of the rise of fascism in the 1930s he later lived in Paris and became famous as a war photographer during the Spanish Civil War. So I feel that I meet another friend.

Travel and Transformation

2011-07-08T20:18:00.012+02:00

After being away for some time from familiar places, it's curious, or so I think, to notice that these places no longer look the same, on one's return. And I don't just mean in terms of verdant growth, though there is that of course, the burgeoning honeysuckle hedge and thick grass covering the garden. But even the familiar road from town to my house, and the house itself, all seem to have undergone subtle transformations. The way space, furniture and the angles of walls are arranged, all seem to have shifted. The evening light was soft and there were only a few clouds in the sky. The light lingered as if it had no desire to leave. Perceptions in other words, have changed.

Travel broadens the mind laughed P when he was interviewing me. It feels more as if I have been picked apart and reassembled. As if the Master Baker has seized this lump of dough, pulled pushed squeezed and folded me so that a yeasty and expansive process has enlivened connections, so there is more room to breathe, and the sense of constriction has melted away. I am as happy to be home as I was happy to set off. Yet these two happinesses are not the same. I find it fascinating, this process of restructuring.

I left three weeks ago, phoning at the last minute, an afterthought really, to make a reservation for the night train from Köln to Budapest, via Munich. Turns out this was just as well, as I could not have done it at Köln station. I was sent an email with my reservation number, and a document of several pages, describing how to operate the machine in order to get it to print out my reservation. Operating these machines in German airports and stations turned out to be the hardest part of the whole journey, with the possible exception of getting a seat on a train to Paris, towards the end. Arriving at Köln airport at night, there did not seem to be anyone who could tell me how to get to Köln Hauptbahnhof. A couple of passengers I asked did not know. I followed a sign for Zug and came face to face with the first of the dreaded machines. It's not so much that my mind goes blank when confronted with these machines, but what I read does not reach the area of the brain that illuminates meaning. There is a logic to machines but it's not the way my mind works. Still, I managed to figure it out to the last step, at which point I asked a man who was doing the same at the neighbouring machine, and he helped me. Such a feeling of success when the ticket is disgorged from the logical belly of the machine. I was now equipped to reach Köln's main railway station and face the next hurdle – the printing out of my reservation ticket.

My emailed instruction manual differed somewhat from the actual screens on the machine - just enough to sow seeds of doubt in my mind, especially as I had been warned not to get it wrong, as I only had one chance. I did make a mistake when typing in the reservation number but fortunately I was able to correct it in time. The sense of accomplishment when the ticket was duly delivered into my hand is hard to describe. The sense of relief when I got on the train – which was a little delayed, so it was now after midnight - showed the ticket and reservation to the inspector and climbed into my couchette, was like having passed an exam or an initiation. Luck – or Providence – was clearly travelling with me. I resolved to cast all doubts aside. The rhythmic rattling of the train and its rocking motion was pure bliss. At some point I fell asleep and woke up before we arrived in Munich. I took a short walk outside the station before getting on the Budapest train.

This notice says it is forbidden to park bicycles here.

Sofia quinta and Stepaway Magazine Update

2011-06-26T09:32:00.003+02:00

This computer sits on an old table with a foot treadle - this mixture of old and new technology is hard work but a quaint idea, don't you think?

I've seen so many lovely places - they need 'recollection in tranquillity' to do them justice. Also I can't yet post any pictures. So this is just one Sofia quinta.

Stars are out above the near-deserted streets -

'round midnight at 'the inglenooks' -

Sofia's miniature Etoile -

the last tram sidles round the corner

squeals softly to a halt beside us

And Stepaway Magazine's latest issue has just come out - you can find a piece I wrote about walking in Tirana's streets here

Glimpses of Budapest

2011-06-19T22:20:00.009+02:00

Quinta journal, 19th June 2o11, Budapest

the faint and reassuring clack of trams
in early morning -
men hose down the underpass
beside Keleti station -
the same streets Robert Capa walked down

*

acacia trees beside the citadel -
bridges sweep across the grey-green Danube -
time is packed into their metalwork,
their stones, an empire,s declarations.
Love too, arching over the water

*

the pomp, the grandeur,
the imperial scale of buildings -
I turn to small things - the map,
the glimpse of water between the metal plates
on the Széchenyi Iánchid bridge

Blossoms, Doorways

2011-06-09T22:53:00.011+02:00

The past lives in us without chronology - Irena Vrkljan

How do you write about the past, in other words, your life?

So often my deliberate attempts at writing about my life in the past, fall into the ruts of narrative sequence. Lose vigour. Become flat and tired. Why did I think writing about the past had to be done, step by step, in this breath-constricting way? Summer has hit me on the back of the head, with its new globe-clusters of white and pink on roadside hedges. I don't know their names – they are like Samuel Palmer's blossoms – dreams of blossoms, visions of blossoms, rounded as bunched drops of petalled honey, poured onto bushes, semi-set, globular, near-dripping.

The same landscape, over and over again, I think, in fury.

Remember another summer on the back of my head....

Of course it isn't really narrative that clenches my life so tight when I try to arrange it in such neat sequential blocks. Not narrative that's to blame when my mind's muscles grip the ripe and juicy pomegranates of memory, and find that trickles are all I manage to extract. No, not narrative but rather, the recipe-making mind with its ordering propensities, its rules and regulations, its assembling of ingredients and then its mixing method.....

When I read Irena Vrkljan's words I want to shout for joy, I breathe deeply, the clenched mind relaxes, because with those words in particular and her writing in general, she expresses what I've felt for some time – that there are other ways rather than the strictly sequential narrative ways, of talking about the past. There is poetry, there are stories, threaded with imagination and yes, the past that lives in us is a network of associations -

There are streets for example, we walk down – remembered or present – so I walk down a street – is it dusty, littered, is it broken? Where is this street? Is it like the ones I walk through now? They are littered with dried blossom, bleached to the colour of yellow aged lace, rattling in gangs and eddies, over the paving stones. They form little whirls, little mini-dervish spirals of joy. On the grass, they rustle like silk, like thin starched cloth, or tiny autumn leaves, in the wrong season. Using streets as a point of entry into memories, into biography. In dreams, it's so often a doorway I approach with speed or without even noticing as if it's any ordinary doorway in waking life – large, wooden, glass, ornate, imposing, with brass handles, or low, blending in with the walls, dull cream, chipped, time-stained.........

Irena Vrkljan was brought up in Belgrade and Zagreb. Her memoirs are published as The Silk, the Shears and Marina; or about Biography.

Her extraordinary writing is a mixture of meditation and memoir, description and literary intimacy, emotional and geographical exile, a linking of places with feeling. The weaving narrative shifts through the portals, connecting events, emotions and literary description. In the second book, she traces the life and work of the lyrical and innovative Russian poet, writer and exile, Marina Tsvetaeva. She pinpoints locations where place and writing come together, both Marina's and her own. As in a tidal flow she recounts Marina's life and work in certain parts of Europe, Prague, Paris, Berlin, the south of France, and her own sometimes very different experiences in the same places. There is deep connective tissue, both emotional and literary, linking these two writers and Vrkljan's prose is both moving and startlingly original.

Art and Love and Annemarie's Vision

2011-05-23T20:26:00.007+02:00

It's a familiar feeling isn't it, the one described by Erin, in her comment On A Year with Rilke – this closeness to someone when their art touches you, someone one has never met, who may not even be alive....

[she wrote, of Chagall - i don't know how to write his name without saying, dear marc... ]

This love for the distant, for those-not-there and maybe long dead, so-called...

And I was looking at the photo of Annemarie Schwarzenbach, and how she leans on someone else half possessive half afraid, and looks the other way, not at her, she looks to the roadside, sombre, her expression dreamy, her stance though, is robust, determined....She is standing on the road beside the car, and her companion sits on the car bonnet, this famous car they drove across the orient, and she leans against her companion's leg and looks the other way. Ella, her companion, also writer and seeker for life's meaning, traveller, one who sets off and travels into yet more life, she smiles, and her hand rests on her companion's shoulder, the one who leans onto the bonnet of her car and onto Ella's leg so comfortable so intimate, or – so determined to be close, so close as water is, or weather, she says, look, this is as natural as sunlight and will not look her feelings in the eye, she has to look away.

I address my thoughts to her I say, as I translate her work, is this a good word, what did you think, what did you feel, how much of what you did not write is there in that gesture, that longing for consolation, that no-one ever gave you, ever, but a tree gave you, somewhere in Africa, in the Congo, somewhere during the war as you wrote reports and people acted wary of you, there were rumours that you were a spy, because you spoke the language of the enemy, a German-speaking Swiss, hardly to be trusted. No consolation there. But then there was this tree -

A tree gave it to you – vision, consolation, breaking up perceptions into shards of light and colour. A tree in Africa. Strangely, what you wrote about that tree, after you'd returned to Engadine, was never published so I think, it lies in some vault in Berne, in Switzerland, for your friends said, no, that's not the way to write about it, try –

and then you died. You had your vision, and you left, ange inconsolable, as Roger Martin du Gard called you. I am travelling in your writing's footsteps, listening for the echo of the unsaid, the hand you grasped then - when it slipped from yours, the journey to the mountains in an Afghan winter, pressing other hands into your own, but always leaving empty handed.

I wish I was that tree, the rainforest, the heat, the light that reached you, Annemarie.

[I read about the details of Annemarie Schwarzenbach's life, and her vision in Africa, in Dominique Laure Miermont's biography of her.]

Mashhad and the Imam Reza Shrine

2011-05-21T23:10:00.008+02:00

I'm working on travel writing from the Middle East for Sons of Camus International Writers Journal [you can read a review of the last issue here].

In Mashhad, in eastern Iran, near the border with Afghanistan, there is a shrine to Iman Reza, which was first built in 818 AD. It was partially destroyed and rebuilt several times, the most recent being 1978 and since then has, according to sacredsites.com undergone continuous renovation and enlargement. I'm grateful to this site for the photographs and the following quotation:

A tradition (legendarily attributed to Imam Reza's father) told that a pilgrimage to Imam Reza's grave would equal 70,000 pilgrimages to Mecca and the tomb of the Imam became a holy place of pilgrimage to which people thronged from throughout Persia.

This is part of my translation of Annemarie Schwarzenbach, writing about Mashhad, and the Imam Reza shrine. It's from the chapter No Man's Land. Between Persia and Afghanistan, in Ou est la Terre des Promesses? a description of the journey she made with fellow Swiss writer Ella Maillart, in 1939-40.

Many more pictures from their journey can be seen at this Swiss website

Annemarie Schwarzenbach, Ella Maillart and the Ford car they drove to Afghanistan.

We have passed through Mashhad. We are leaving the town behind, its gridwork of new streets and the narrow alleyways of the covered bazaar, plunged in semi-darkness. Towering above it all is the shining golden dome of the tomb of the Imam Reza. It looks like a bell-jar that has descended from the peerless blue sky, a blazing star at midday.

We are leaving behind the imperishable blue of the mosque of Gohar Shad, the crushing heat in the courtyards, which seem to echo a harmony of shapes and colours. We are leaving behind the darkness and the luxury of mirrors inside the sanctuary, the sighs and tears of the emaciated pilgrims, Shi’ites from the four corners of Asia, who for years have dreamed of kissing the bars of thesarcophagus. They have crossed the desert, enduring extremes of exhaustion, to be able to touch the marble floor with their bare feet and to see the fourteen doors of silver, and the two doors of gold, opening in front of them. On theirknees, weeping and crying out with exhaustion and hysterical joy, they clutch the iron railings which screen the Imam lying in the darkness, surrounded by modern carpets, turbans, votive offerings and holy texts.

Outside, all around the spacious mosque, the craftsmen – metal workers and goldsmiths, saddlers and tailors – work in kiosks so tiny they are like cages. In rooms with rounded arches full of dusty carpets the sellers haggle over prices and the shaft which leads down from the bazaar to the darkness of the water tank descends for fifty steps. Porters dressed in rags stagger under the weight of their leather sacks.

We are leaving the town behind. A strong wind is blowing on the road that heads towards the east and which will soon turn into a desert track. Here and there the straw coloured fields are wiped out by the grievous drought. From the top of the bare mountains the mounds of kanat come into view again. They are lined up across the plain, the gaping and thirsty craters of the underground canals. They give life to a village, a slip of green around a swarm of earth domes which are cracking under the scorching sun. But, in the inner courtyard of a caravanserai which resembles a fortress, water from the kanat fills a tank and in the vaulted room which adjoins it, men give us tea and melons.

Yes, even here it is possible for human beings to live, and Persia gives us one last surprise, offered like a farewell present to a departing guest as a token of friendship. At two o’clock we take a break and seek out some shade in the village of Torbat. At a junction where two roads intersect at right angles, the central area is arranged in the obligatory fashion for every modern Iranian town, with a police post, a few dried-out flower beds, and a scattering of sand and gravel. Surrounded only by broken-down clay walls, and hollowed out human habitations, in the midst of this sea of yellowed ruins, a gleam of turquoise leaps out, and a winding path leads us right to the doorway of a mosque whose remains evoke all the pomp and beauty of the age of Shah Abbas the Great.

First of all there's a garden, that serves as an entrance. The fan of branches from a spreading pine tree offers shade, and there is grass growing – it seems to us as soft and thick as a carpet. The triangle of a chain in the lower gate, a blind man, who is the guardian, a few young boys and then, encircled by bushes, the yellow and alabaster coloured gravestones. Finally, rising magnificently into the sky, there is the high entrance door, the mehrab, decorated with delicate blue and turquoise arabesques. At the side, half hidden by a wall, the luminous green dome of a mausoleum.

The complete text, including their arrival in Afghanistan, will appear in Issue 8 of the magazine, later this year.

The Rock Garden of South East Europe - Extract 1

2011-05-12T16:23:00.002+02:00

Extract from the first time I lived in Albania, several years ago.

The title The Rock Garden of South East Europe is taken from an essay by Faik Konitza, an Albanian Writer

Opening of the Covered Marketplace at Elbasan

Elbasan lies in a plain, surrounded by mountains. On one side of the plain is the town itself and on the other - occupying an area which at first sight is just as extensive - is a grotesque array of rusted metal pipes and tubes. This skeletal arrangement is the remains of a metallurgical factory, built by the Chinese during the Communist regime. A trail of yellowish smoke drifts from a chimney and settles in the air over the town.

In some places the road from Tirana to Elbasan runs along the mountain tops, giving views over layers of peaks, becoming fainter and mistier with distance. To make the steep descent, the road curls and loops back on itself. One side of the road is built up like an embankment. Parts of it erupt into mosaics of determined and heroic workers, grasping their hammers and welding instruments, staring past you, out across the Elbasan valley and the sickly yellow smoke dribbling from the chimney.

The morning is grey and overcast. Just past the outskirts of Tirana, we cross a bridge that was closed for a long time because parts of it caved in or fell away. W

told me that it had partially collapsed because some excavation work had undermined the bridge's foundations. Capsized dumper trucks and tractors on their sides lie in the river like forlorn dinky toys.

As we climb up the winding mountain road, heading for Elbasan, we leave behind all signs of habitation and are surrounded by the wildness of the mountains. The landscape becomes stark and bare, a sea of brown-peaked frozen waves, breathtakingly beautiful. Clearly, we are in another world, one that belongs to nature.

It begins to snow a little, small flurries of white blurring the vision of the mountains. The road curls along the top of one of the mountains, with valleys falling away on either side. Some of the peaks are rocky, slanted and so thin they look almost shaved to a point, like giant pencils. Thin cloud dances on the mountain-peaks, throwing off a snow as light as the reflection of emotion in water.

By the time we get to Elbasan the sky is still grey and a light rain is falling. We are here to take part in the opening ceremony of the covered marketplace whose construction we have funded. But before going to the marketplace we visit Kuqan school, whose renovation we are also funding. There are the usual broken steps, plywood doors, huge amount of dust and grime in the classrooms, shabby, rickety desks. The classrooms are unheated, apart from the nursery, where there is a wood-burning stove, which fails to make much impact on the whole room, but does take the worst chill off the air. The little ones are not free to move around, but sit at low tables, crowded together. They all gaze at us fixedly, as we talk to their teacher. This open and unembarrassed curiosity is also present in the older students in the other classrooms. They stand up politely when we come in. And do the same when we leave, with an enthusiastic chorus of 'mirufpashim' (goodbye).

The upstairs of this school is blocked off because it’s unusable. The rooms there have no doors and the tiles are completely broken up. There are window frames but no windows. In one room, there are piles of excrement on the floor. But outside, there are neat whitewashed houses, with little yards where vines are threaded up sticks and across a lattice of wire at the top, so that in summer their leaves will provide shade. In a nearby hay barn an old woman is pulling out hay with a long fork. And in front of the school, rows of young saplings have recently been planted. In a few years time they will transform the bare brown earth, and provide shade for the children.

We then head for the marketplace. We stand around in the damp and chill for about half an hour, waiting for the mayor, as the ceremony cannot begin until he arrives. I wonder if his delay is calculated, to emphasise his importance, or simply a disregard for time. W has mentioned that she has had some difficult dealings with the mayor.

His actual involvement in the construction of the covered marketplace has been minimal, but his consent has been necessary at every step of the negotiations. At times, W has hinted, he has been obstructive, deliberately delaying the procedure, just to show his importance, and to show that he is in control. But, despite all the difficulties, the project has been completed. The fruit and vegetable vendors, who have previously had to sell their wares out in the open, in the chill and wet of winter as well as the baking heat of summer, will soon have a covered area to protect them from the elements. So W is quietly triumphant, and tolerates the mayor’s impoliteness, or deliberate show of power, whichever it might be, with a show of patience and brisk politeness.

The mayor, when he finally arrives, turns out to be a large man with a loud voice. He gives a speech in which, W whispers, he takes most of the credit for the undertaking, as if it had been his idea and had enjoyed his unflagging commitment. W’s speech is brief, praising all involved in the undertaking, and not forgetting to give due thanks to the mayor. She cuts the red ribbon, marking the official opening and then things move very quickly. The vendors are inside and have set up shop with amazing speed. Within minutes the counters are piled with scales and vivid colours - apples, oranges, lettuces, leeks, red and green peppers. Customers throng the aisles and the metal roof resounds with chatter. P and I stockpile fruit and vegetables from one of the nearest vendors and we pile them in the car.

After the ceremony, we visit another school, driving on the Librazhd to Kukes road. Librazhd is small but has an elegant curving main street, lined with trees. On the way there we pass an old woman in black, with a white scarf round her head, digging gravel and sand, to make mortar. On the brown mountainsides, there are trees with white and pink blossom. At the Hotolishti school, which we are proposing to fund, some rooms are full of rubbish, as if it had been bombed. Some of the floorboards are wet and we are told that if it rains, the ceilings leak so badly that the room are closed and classes abandoned. To get to the playground, you have to climb up a long flight of steps. There is a fine view from the top, but it is dangerous for there are no protective barriers.

On the way back, Gramoz, our driver, stops and buys some purple flowers. The clouds have gone, the sun is out. Some of the peaks, still capped with snow, are dazzling in this light. We seem to be higher up than everything that’s visible.

Back in Tirana, the evening sunlight catches pieces of buildings, clutches at them, in some rosy sense of memory - walls turn deep and mysterious, puddles

become wells of gold and the few soft, green-feathered branches of drifting trees, shine in the evening glow. We drive slowly through the narrow back lanes, swaying up and down with each pothole.

In the twilight, when I walk down the steps from the office, a rat saunters across the path below. Mattresses, chairs, boots, tiles, and pieces of wood are piled up in the river.

An old woman, bent over from a huge sack piled on her back, rummages through the litter bin. The water from the broken waterpipe has filled the hole in the street and overflowed into the road. Two boys float toy boats, tied to string, on the murky lake that the road has turned into. In the rooster street, with the thin strip of muddy, rubbish-clogged yard, where the hens and roosters peck, a scrawny tree has burst into white blossom, a sudden spillage of emotion, a rustle of light against the flaky grey grime of the buildings.

I come home with a bunch of flowers given to me at the Elbasan market opening ceremony. The flowers are vivid shades of yellow and orange.

Beltane - The Fire

2011-05-01T19:41:00.008+02:00

I put you – at the top of the tree,

here, where the gold tangles

with hair and bruised skin -

I pull you out of my heart

and feel the hot brand

tight as a hoop and round as the sun

jump in -

yellow blossom outside,

on the inside, this fire

that aims to consume me

'to my one desire'.