For you, Tommy, it's about bloody time that the war was over

"The worse things get, the more passionately the English cling to the past." - W.H Auden

WB Yeats and The Second Coming

"Throughout the whole absurd life I’ve lived, a dark wind had been rising toward me from somewhere deep in my future, across years that were still to come, and as it passed, this wind levelled whatever was offered to me at the time, in years no more real than the ones I was living."

                                         - Albert Camus

W.B. Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

                                      - W.B. Yeats

News of Ciaran Carson's death came on the same day that I attended a discussion to mark the centenary of Yeats' poem, held by Irish poets and academics John MacAuliffe, Martina Evans, Alan Gillis and Colette Bryce. To mark his passing they read from his work, with the final poem of the evening being 'Fear', whose opening two lines I have always rather liked:

I fear the vast dimensions of eternity.
I fear the gap between the platform and the train.

What Carson is saying is that the human mind, being either incapable or unwilling to face up to the infinity and emptiness of time and space and our own insignificance in it as mere pawns of fate, chooses instead to focus on those smaller, more immediate risks which we think we can control. For me there is also an element of this in Yeats' much quoted (and much more quoted since June 2016) poem. The reason for the concept of a second coming (or its equivalent in other religions) is precisely to put some sort of end point on our current situation. But the poet is also saying that when the apocalypse comes - and it will come because it always has before - it won't be in one big bang, but rather in a series of mundane problems of the type we face every day anyway: the falcon will not hear the falconer for example. In other words, we may not recognise it when we see it; indeed, we may have already failed to recognise it.

The panellists wisely steered away from Yeats' peculiar love life, his spiritualism and his anti-democratic political views and focused on his craftsmanship. Whilst arising from the context of the end of the Great War, the struggle for Irish independence, the Bolshevik revolution etc, the poem is timeless and relevant to any age that fears and foresees an impending calamity; which, of course, has been the case for all civilisations throughout history and will continue to be so until man finally annihilates himself completely.

I won't attempt to summarise the wide-ranging discussion but it covered areas as diverse as the Riddles of the Sphinx (I didn't previously know that there were two), Brueghel's painting of Icarus (reproduced in this blog post about Auden's poem), and the band Uriah Heep (unlikely ever to be mentioned further in this blog unless I get round to writing a post about how I spent my 8,000th day alive), to the effect of becoming a father on middle-aged men (if you ask me the first ten years are the most difficult, and the subsequent ten years are the most difficult as well).

Uriah Heep

Let's finish with another Irish poet, again writing about a specific event, but with universal applicability:


Anything can happen. You know how Jupiter
Will mostly wait for clouds to gather head
Before he hurls the lightning? Well, just now
He galloped his thunder cart and his horses

Across a clear blue sky. It shook the earth
And the clogged underearth, the River Styx,
The winding streams, the Atlantic shore itself.
Anything can happen, the tallest towers

Be overturned, those in high places daunted,
Those overlooked regarded. Stropped-beak Fortune
Swoops, making the air gasp, tearing the crest off one,
Setting it down bleeding on the next.

Ground gives. The heaven's weight
Lifts up off Atlas like a kettle-lid.
Capstones shift, nothing resettles right.
Telluric ash and fire-spores boil away.

                      - Seamus Heaney

Tonight, Matthew, I am going to be W.H. Auden

And so to the theatre. I have been to see 'The Habit of Art' by the very much alive, alive, oh, Alan Bennett. This production features David Yelland and Matthew Kelly. You may recognise the former as an actor (he was the Prince of Wales in 'Chariots of Fire' - the Nazi sympathising one, not the chap who speaks to plants) more than you do the latter. However though Kelly is perhaps best known for lowbrow television that was always by way of a diversion from his career on stage (*). He trained with Richard Griffiths, much esteemed by this blog and a frequent actor in Bennett's plays and films, indeed he was the originator of the part played here by Kelly.

The play is, of course, very funny and very clever; certainly too clever for me to be able to give much insight in to what it's really about, beyond the imaginary meeting portrayed between Auden and Britten in Oxford some thirty years after they fell out and stopped speaking to each other. The nuances of gay identity examined are somewhat beyond me, although I did get the impression that Bennett is more sympathetic to Auden's more straightforward approach to trade than to Britten's penchant for young boys. There was some discussion of 'Death in Venice' (astonishingly Thomas Mann turned out to be Auden's father in law; much of the surprise obviously coming from the idea of him having been married in the first place) and the judgement on the composer's intention was somewhat harsher than mine. Bennett also finds time, via a play within the play, to poke fun at actors. This mise en abyme - in which the fictitious meeting takes place - is called 'Caliban's Day' reflecting Auden's apparent view that the end of 'The Tempest' could have been improved. Interestingly the way that Bennett chooses to end his play is with what is essentially a quote from Macbeth.

I know it's from Macbeth because I've just seen that as well. I saw the remaining three plays at the pop-up Shakespeare's Rose in York. As well as the Scottish play these were A Midsummer Night's Dream and Romeo & Juliet. I and the elder Miss Epictetus, on holiday from university at the moment, rather enjoyed them all, although the critical reaction elsewhere was mixed. The place didn't have as much atmosphere as the Globe, but I rather enjoy standing up to watch Shakespeare. If I have criticism it would be that they staged the full version of each play; there is undoubtedly a good reason why an edited text is normally used.


(*) I had only seen him once before, giving his Malvolio to an audience that seemed to consist entirely of me and several hundred convent schoolgirls. It was disconcerting even for someone of my experience and sang froid, but at least I didn't have to queue for the toilet during the interval.

Lamentations Chapter 3 Verse 28

“All I have is a voice.” - W.H. Auden

Sadly, what was true for Wystan is not so for Epictetus, who has lost his voice. Still, as Publilius Syrus said in his sententiae, "I often regret that I have spoken; never that I have been silent".

Beardy Branson is a twat

 "Sob, heavy world
  Sob as you spin
   Mantled in mist, remote from the happy:"

                  - W.H. Auden

The spin that Auden referred to was - at least I assume it was - the actual rotation of the earth. ["I hope," says the Rhetorical Pedant, returning after being far too long absent from this blog "I really hope, that you're going to go off on one about the length of days at the equator again."] But my gripe is with spin in the other sense of Public Relations, or lying as it used to be called when I was at school.

I'm speaking specifically of course of all this guff about Jeremy Corbyn and the train. Now, obviously I have no idea what actually happened and have spent many hours strenuously trying to avoid finding out. As Marcus Aurelius put it "Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth". Harry Pearson, wargamer and author of Achtung Schweinehund!, puts it thus: "Claims there were vacant seats on a Virgin train a typical Trotskyite slur on great British entrepreneur and his sales force."

However, of one thing I am, from personal experience, absolutely certain, Virgin East Coast provide a terrible service and it is substantially worse than it was when it was run by the state-owned East Coast Mainline. People do, genuinely and often, have to sit on the floor. The power sockets regularly don't work. The train that I came up from London a couple of weeks ago had one carriage out of action because the doors had jammed and one where the heating was stuck on full blast - on a day when the temperature outside was 28˚C; the main point being that no one was in the slightest surprised. They've just put the fares up for the second time this year. Therefore, whatever the rights and wrongs of that particular train, Virgin Trains have rightly been called out for being useless at what they are supposed to do in return for our money.

And yet their slick PR machine, taking full advantage of the media's existing antipathy to Corbyn, have switched the narrative from one where they are held to account for their performance to one where they are the victims. As Mark Twain never said “A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes”. And all the while the long-suffering passenger longs to see Branson humbling himself in the style of Japanese management as atonement, preferably followed by then ritually disembowelling himself Japanses style as well.

 Before anyone points it out, I know that the line is managed and 90% owned by Stagecoach, but if Branson wants to be the face of the firm then he must take the consequences. Unsurprisingly I would be perfectly happy for Gloag and especially the homophobic Souter to join him. And it's the Stagecoach link I think that explains the attempts to smear Corbyn. A Corbyn government (I shall return soon to discuss whether such a thing is even remotely possible) would not just renationalise the railways, but would regulate bus companies. They're just getting their retaliation in first.

Oh Tell Me The Truth About Love

It's National Poetry Day.

Oh Tell Me The Truth About Love

Some say love's a little boy,
And some say it's a bird,
Some say it makes the world go round,
Some say that's absurd,
And when I asked the man next door,
Who looked as if he knew,
His wife got very cross indeed,
And said it wouldn't do.

Does it look like a pair of pyjamas,
Or the ham in a temperance hotel?
Does its odour remind one of llamas,
Or has it a comforting smell?
Is it prickly to touch as a hedge is,
Or soft as eiderdown fluff?
Is it sharp or quite smooth at the edges?
O tell me the truth about love.

Our history books refer to it
In cryptic little notes,
It's quite a common topic on
The Transatlantic boats;
I've found the subject mentioned in
Accounts of suicides,
And even seen it scribbled on
The backs of railway guides.

Does it howl like a hungry Alsatian,
Or boom like a military band?
Could one give a first-rate imitation
On a saw or a Steinway Grand?
Is its singing at parties a riot?
Does it only like Classical stuff?
Will it stop when one wants to be quiet?
O tell me the truth about love.

I looked inside the summer-house;
It wasn't even there;
I tried the Thames at Maidenhead,
And Brighton's bracing air.
I don't know what the blackbird sang,
Or what the tulip said;
But it wasn't in the chicken-run,
Or underneath the bed.

Can it pull extraordinary faces?
Is it usually sick on a swing?
Does it spend all its time at the races,
or fiddling with pieces of string?
Has it views of its own about money?
Does it think Patriotism enough?
Are its stories vulgar but funny?
O tell me the truth about love.

When it comes, will it come without warning
Just as I'm picking my nose?
Will it knock on my door in the morning,
Or tread in the bus on my toes?
Will it come like a change in the weather?
Will its greeting be courteous or rough?
Will it alter my life altogether?
O tell me the truth about love.

                                    - W.H. Auden

"Our life is what our thoughts make it"

So said Marcus Aurelius. This week I have been, as Blake put it, "he who kisses the joy as it flies", and it caused me a whole lot of angst and more than one sleepless night. Whether "eternity's sunrise" will be my reward or not is, I think, neither here nor there.

                                 Moments of happiness do not come often,

                                 Opportunity’s easy to miss.

                                 O let us seize them, of all their joys squeeze them, 

                                 For tomorrow will come when none may kiss.

                                                   - W.H. Auden

I took refuge in walking and can add another to our irregular series of bridges of the Yorkshire dales. This time it's the seventeenth century Barden Bridge.

The sunlight on the garden
Hardens and grows cold,
We cannot cage the minute
Within its nets of gold

- Louis MacNeice

Musée des Beaux Arts

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

                                   - W.H. Auden