Barbara’s comment on the previous post reminds that I’ve been meaning to write about her book, Kairos.
There’s always something special about reading poetry that comes out of a familiar landscape whether you’re entering that place to see it from a different perspective or starting there and being spun out into new places or new ways of seeing it. What I like about this collection is that it deals with two familiar landscapes and contains poems I would like to have written.
I don’t know when I first heard the stories of the Tain, or Finn. I knew them before I read a child’s version in one of the first books I owned. They hung around until I had to write about them, in a sequence that tracked from a nine year old’s enthusiasm for Cuchullain's extravagant defiance to a more troubled engagement with the whole story. Fortunately I was bog ignorant at the time of all the other retellings. I wrote my pieces, had them published, recorded them with music for the cd (click Here if you're interested)
and shook myself loose.
In Lady G there is nothing remotely Cuchulanoid.
(The cd is also available on Itunes)
Reading poems that relate to these stories is like coming home, but to find someone’s rearranged the furniture, calling into question my memory of the rooms. It creates an intriguing conversation. Usually there’s you and the poem, but this becomes a conversation between the reader and the poem and the reader and author’s versions of the stories the poems are related to.
When the conversations really starts to move is when the poem refigures what you think you know and makes you look at it again. So I like the sequence ‘Alighting on Legends and myths' I like the way it does what it does without resorting to the gimmick of giving Cuchullain a hand grenade or making him the CEO of an embattled company facing off its debtors at a board meeting.
It would be tempting to think of Kairos as having poems about myths and legends and poems about “everyday normal” domestic experience. But I’m intrigued by the idea that if you treat the heroic and mythic as normal, then you open the possibility of treating the “everyday” as mythic. There are several poems here that seem to do that, by dealing with specific human incidents in modern settings: family, parents, partners children, in such a way that elevates them to the level of myth without distorting them.
It’s that other, most familiar landscape so often ignored or trivialized, but which, when treated with respect and attention, as here, allows the poet to rearrange the furniture and make the reader look again.
Which is another way of saying there are poems in this book which I wish I’d written or could write.
Kairos by Barbara Smith available from doghouse books at www.doghousebooks.ie
Thursday, May 7, 2009
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
Still searching for the Real King Arthur
What is it drives this desire to find “the real …”? Is it the same obsession that drives those who insist that despite all the evidence to the contrary the man from Stratford didn’t/couldn’t write Shakespeare’s plays?
Not the kind of mysticism that seeks the “truth” in beliefs validated by centuries of debate, histories of persecution and which have now been accepted to the point of institutionalization: but the kind of mysticism that someone else defines as weirdo and gets you persecuted and institutionalized?
If only we could find the right code, the right way of looking aslant, we could reveal the hidden truth. There must be a hidden truth. There must be something beneath, behind, under, hidden; more than. Life without it would be just life. Without it we would have to deal with the surface. As Delumeau says about the invention of paradise: without a possible ideal afterlife you would have to deal with life here and now on your particular spot of earth, because there would be no second chance and no “better’ to look forward to. Without a real Arthur, or a real Robin Hood, you’d be left with….?
Dealing with the evidence for King Arthur is a specialist’s field that requires years of training and an impressive command of several mini disciplines. How much easier to simply assert based on whatever you find useful for the assertion. Who does need experts anyway.
So, the search for the Real King Arthur. What little evidence there is, and God knows it’s been gone over enough times, won’t substantiate his existence. If he did exist, then he existed in the “darkest period” of British history; dark simply for lack of information.
An inhabitant of that strange world evoked by the gatekeeper’s welcome in "Culuwch and Olwen":
Meat for thy dogs and corn for thy horse, and hot peppered chops for thyself, and wine brimming over and delectable songs before thee. Food for fifty men shall come to thee in the hospice; there men from afar take their meat and the scions of other countries who do not proffer a craft in Arthur's court. It will be no worse for thee there than for Arthur in the court: a woman to sleep with thee and delectable songs before thee. (Trans Jones and Jones)
To get an idea of the psossible scale, you need to forget the castles and cathedrals of the later Middle Ages. You need to visit something like Castle Dore in Cornwall. Perched above the estuary of the Fowey River, today it is little more than a broken set of earthen embankments hardly higher than a tall man's head, where cows graze near a bus stop. This small hillfort is traditionally ascribed to King Mark. The “Tristan stone” is not far away. He's the bad husband in the legend of Tristan and Isuelt, another story that was later swallowed by the Arthurian cycle. The small scale of the place humanises it. You can look down to the green wooded slopes of the Fowey, and see the little clumps of trees, and the story of Isuelt's flight to be with Tristan in the forest becomes at once human and manageable. Two errant adolescents sneaking away to have sex in the woods is far more convincing than the stories of magic and casts of thousands that gradually added themselves to the story of Arthur.
But even if he did exist and you could meet him, he’d be a dark age warlord, a football hooligan with a license to create mayhem; a dirty, unwashed thug whose only distinction was to be good at slaughtering dirty unwashed thugs…closer to the warriors of Y Gododdin (who all die by the way) than Malory’s perfect knight:
Wearing a brooch, armed, fighting in the van of battle
A man mighty in battle before his death day
A leader of the charge before the armies
5 times fifty fell before his blades
Of men of Deira and Bernicia there fell
20 hundred, their annihilation in an hour
He'd sooner his flesh for the wolves than go to the wedding
Sooner be profit for the raven than go to the alter
Sooner his blood flow to the ground than he get due burial
In return for mead in the hall amongst hosts
Hyueid Hir will be praised as long as there are minstrels.
(This is taken from translations I did twenty years ago. It seems too smooth, so I suspect I checked it against Kenneth Jackson's.)
As a successful thug winning battles that were probably nothing more than gang wars without machine guns, (the laws of Inne, a seventh century King of Wessex, define the old English word for army, "Here" as any gathering of more than thirty-five armed men) he could have existed.
But the only argument that stands is Arthur Ash’s; It’s hard to believe there can be this much smoke without a fire.
What centuries of Europeans saw in that smoke and through it is beautiful and fascinating and I believe worthy of attention. What produced the smoke has disappeared and seems of little value except to those making money out of an industry that preys upon its audience.
Not the kind of mysticism that seeks the “truth” in beliefs validated by centuries of debate, histories of persecution and which have now been accepted to the point of institutionalization: but the kind of mysticism that someone else defines as weirdo and gets you persecuted and institutionalized?
If only we could find the right code, the right way of looking aslant, we could reveal the hidden truth. There must be a hidden truth. There must be something beneath, behind, under, hidden; more than. Life without it would be just life. Without it we would have to deal with the surface. As Delumeau says about the invention of paradise: without a possible ideal afterlife you would have to deal with life here and now on your particular spot of earth, because there would be no second chance and no “better’ to look forward to. Without a real Arthur, or a real Robin Hood, you’d be left with….?
Dealing with the evidence for King Arthur is a specialist’s field that requires years of training and an impressive command of several mini disciplines. How much easier to simply assert based on whatever you find useful for the assertion. Who does need experts anyway.
So, the search for the Real King Arthur. What little evidence there is, and God knows it’s been gone over enough times, won’t substantiate his existence. If he did exist, then he existed in the “darkest period” of British history; dark simply for lack of information.
An inhabitant of that strange world evoked by the gatekeeper’s welcome in "Culuwch and Olwen":
Meat for thy dogs and corn for thy horse, and hot peppered chops for thyself, and wine brimming over and delectable songs before thee. Food for fifty men shall come to thee in the hospice; there men from afar take their meat and the scions of other countries who do not proffer a craft in Arthur's court. It will be no worse for thee there than for Arthur in the court: a woman to sleep with thee and delectable songs before thee. (Trans Jones and Jones)
To get an idea of the psossible scale, you need to forget the castles and cathedrals of the later Middle Ages. You need to visit something like Castle Dore in Cornwall. Perched above the estuary of the Fowey River, today it is little more than a broken set of earthen embankments hardly higher than a tall man's head, where cows graze near a bus stop. This small hillfort is traditionally ascribed to King Mark. The “Tristan stone” is not far away. He's the bad husband in the legend of Tristan and Isuelt, another story that was later swallowed by the Arthurian cycle. The small scale of the place humanises it. You can look down to the green wooded slopes of the Fowey, and see the little clumps of trees, and the story of Isuelt's flight to be with Tristan in the forest becomes at once human and manageable. Two errant adolescents sneaking away to have sex in the woods is far more convincing than the stories of magic and casts of thousands that gradually added themselves to the story of Arthur.
But even if he did exist and you could meet him, he’d be a dark age warlord, a football hooligan with a license to create mayhem; a dirty, unwashed thug whose only distinction was to be good at slaughtering dirty unwashed thugs…closer to the warriors of Y Gododdin (who all die by the way) than Malory’s perfect knight:
Wearing a brooch, armed, fighting in the van of battle
A man mighty in battle before his death day
A leader of the charge before the armies
5 times fifty fell before his blades
Of men of Deira and Bernicia there fell
20 hundred, their annihilation in an hour
He'd sooner his flesh for the wolves than go to the wedding
Sooner be profit for the raven than go to the alter
Sooner his blood flow to the ground than he get due burial
In return for mead in the hall amongst hosts
Hyueid Hir will be praised as long as there are minstrels.
(This is taken from translations I did twenty years ago. It seems too smooth, so I suspect I checked it against Kenneth Jackson's.)
As a successful thug winning battles that were probably nothing more than gang wars without machine guns, (the laws of Inne, a seventh century King of Wessex, define the old English word for army, "Here" as any gathering of more than thirty-five armed men) he could have existed.
But the only argument that stands is Arthur Ash’s; It’s hard to believe there can be this much smoke without a fire.
What centuries of Europeans saw in that smoke and through it is beautiful and fascinating and I believe worthy of attention. What produced the smoke has disappeared and seems of little value except to those making money out of an industry that preys upon its audience.
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
Still searching for Arthur..Glastonbury and Cadbury
After a windswept and disappointing day in Glastonbury, we came to Cadbury late in the afternoon, having lost ourselves in a combination of a featureless landscape and an inadequate road map.
Glastonbury, for all its mythic and mystic possibilities, had been a nothing place. The struggle up the Tor in a violent wind had provided a good view but that was about it. The abbey, which in the Middle Ages claimed to contain Arthur's grave, had been nothing but a pile of stones on some very green grass. If this was the famous isle of Avalon, as some of the tacky books in the local shops suggested, to which the dying Arthur had been transported after his final battle, then the fairies were all long gone.
Tired and disappointed we had decided to make one last attempt at pilgrimage, to the Iron Age hill fort at Cadbury, which had been excavated by Leslie Alcock in the late 1960's. During the immediate post-roman period the earthworks had been refortified and Cadbury had been advanced as the type of place where Arthur, or someone like him, might have lived, had he lived at all, in that dark period between the end of Roman Britain and the coming of the Roman missionaries.
We arrived as the sun was going down, and trudged up a muddy track, through a wooden gate, to the hilltop. There was nothing there but the vast earthen ramparts, and a primitive feel that deepened with the growing shadows and the dropping temperature. Human beings had used this place continuously since the Neolithic period. From the top of the hill you get an uninterrupted view across the plane we had just crisscrossed. It was easy to imagine staring into the distance, watching for the telltale signs of an enemy on the move. As the sun set it was impossible not to feel the weight of its history pressing down, and the feel of so much time trembling under its own weight. If you turned quickly, it was easy to believe you would see and hear men and women in fifth-century clothes moving through the murk.
The stories of Arthur grew out of this landscape: born in the wind blown rain and the wild sea thrashing against steep dark cliffs. Sunshine on green hills after rain, their soft curves like reclining forms, and only songs, friendship, the warmth of a lover's body and the words and music of the story teller to offset the misery of long, dark, cold winters. If you want the "Arthur of history " forget the "sources" and go to Cornwall, to Bodmin Moor when the snow dusts the tors and the air is so clear it looks like it's going to crack. Go to Tintagel. Ignore the tea shoppes and the pathetic ruins and watch the sea on the cliffs and listen to the wild wheel and call of the sea birds. Go to Castle Dore in the evening or Cadbury, or go for a walk in the Welsh Hills on a bad weather day (there's lots of them to chose from). Get away from electric lights and computers and mobile phones and sit in the dark by a fire and listen to the noises around you. And imagine a world of shadows and desperate uncertainty: five hundred years of stability, gone. Nothing more now than a story your grandfather told you: a memory of logic and straight lines and predictability. Imagine a small group of armed men gathered around a fire: there's not enough light to keep the shadows out and there is not enough information to keep ignorance at bay.
The Historian, reading backwards, takes his or her own assumptions and imposes them, subconsciously, on the inhabitants of the past. Hampered by all the intellectual paraphernalia of the twentieth century, it requires an act of imagination to begin to understand. Some documents call Arthur the "Comes Britanicu", and much has been made of this title. Scholars have pondered whether it was being used in a late Roman technical sense: was he appointed by the "Kings" of Britain to lead their armies? Or did it mean something else?
The reality would have been very different. If, during the fifth century, someone arrived at your front gate and said "I'm the Comes Britanicu" the watch man didn't ask, like a refugee from a Monty Python skit: "Excuse me, are you using this term in its strictly literal sense with its legal and administrative implications, which date back to the later days of the Roman presence in this Island? Or are you merely using it to associate yourself with a no longer existing authority? Do you even have the first idea what it means?" No. The watchman saw a man with enough armed followers to burn the place down around his ears and opened the door.
We live in a world that is mapped in terms fo more than geography. The calendar and the diary offer a sense of security and continuity. We make plans for tomorrow, next week, two years’ time. Electric light has banished the nightmares. Information is accessible and you can, if you want, check your facts. You can pick up the phone and talk to someone in another city to find out if the rumours of disaster are true. You can compare news reports, from a variety of media, to try and sift the truth.
These people didn't and couldn't.
In the dark beyond the fire's glow there were all the traditional monsters: the age-old earth demons that snuffle through the night reeking of death and lusting for flesh. And now there are newer enemies, men whose language they can't speak, who they don't understand, who have come to burn and destroy what little is left of their way of life. And just as the light isn't strong enough, there isn't enough information, only rumours and stories. Around small fires, on a hill top, in a ruined villa, by a lake side, in the shelter of the rebuilt walls of an ancient hill fort, they huddle near to the flames and warm themselves with stories of the war they have lost and a leader who won five battles, or eight battles, or was it twelve, who slew fifty or seventy or 960 of the enemy in one day, and the story grows, appropriates incidents, is overlaid with wish fulfilment and the "truth" fades and in the end the only truth is the truth of consolation to be passed on to children and grandchildren.
Glastonbury, for all its mythic and mystic possibilities, had been a nothing place. The struggle up the Tor in a violent wind had provided a good view but that was about it. The abbey, which in the Middle Ages claimed to contain Arthur's grave, had been nothing but a pile of stones on some very green grass. If this was the famous isle of Avalon, as some of the tacky books in the local shops suggested, to which the dying Arthur had been transported after his final battle, then the fairies were all long gone.
Tired and disappointed we had decided to make one last attempt at pilgrimage, to the Iron Age hill fort at Cadbury, which had been excavated by Leslie Alcock in the late 1960's. During the immediate post-roman period the earthworks had been refortified and Cadbury had been advanced as the type of place where Arthur, or someone like him, might have lived, had he lived at all, in that dark period between the end of Roman Britain and the coming of the Roman missionaries.
We arrived as the sun was going down, and trudged up a muddy track, through a wooden gate, to the hilltop. There was nothing there but the vast earthen ramparts, and a primitive feel that deepened with the growing shadows and the dropping temperature. Human beings had used this place continuously since the Neolithic period. From the top of the hill you get an uninterrupted view across the plane we had just crisscrossed. It was easy to imagine staring into the distance, watching for the telltale signs of an enemy on the move. As the sun set it was impossible not to feel the weight of its history pressing down, and the feel of so much time trembling under its own weight. If you turned quickly, it was easy to believe you would see and hear men and women in fifth-century clothes moving through the murk.
The stories of Arthur grew out of this landscape: born in the wind blown rain and the wild sea thrashing against steep dark cliffs. Sunshine on green hills after rain, their soft curves like reclining forms, and only songs, friendship, the warmth of a lover's body and the words and music of the story teller to offset the misery of long, dark, cold winters. If you want the "Arthur of history " forget the "sources" and go to Cornwall, to Bodmin Moor when the snow dusts the tors and the air is so clear it looks like it's going to crack. Go to Tintagel. Ignore the tea shoppes and the pathetic ruins and watch the sea on the cliffs and listen to the wild wheel and call of the sea birds. Go to Castle Dore in the evening or Cadbury, or go for a walk in the Welsh Hills on a bad weather day (there's lots of them to chose from). Get away from electric lights and computers and mobile phones and sit in the dark by a fire and listen to the noises around you. And imagine a world of shadows and desperate uncertainty: five hundred years of stability, gone. Nothing more now than a story your grandfather told you: a memory of logic and straight lines and predictability. Imagine a small group of armed men gathered around a fire: there's not enough light to keep the shadows out and there is not enough information to keep ignorance at bay.
The Historian, reading backwards, takes his or her own assumptions and imposes them, subconsciously, on the inhabitants of the past. Hampered by all the intellectual paraphernalia of the twentieth century, it requires an act of imagination to begin to understand. Some documents call Arthur the "Comes Britanicu", and much has been made of this title. Scholars have pondered whether it was being used in a late Roman technical sense: was he appointed by the "Kings" of Britain to lead their armies? Or did it mean something else?
The reality would have been very different. If, during the fifth century, someone arrived at your front gate and said "I'm the Comes Britanicu" the watch man didn't ask, like a refugee from a Monty Python skit: "Excuse me, are you using this term in its strictly literal sense with its legal and administrative implications, which date back to the later days of the Roman presence in this Island? Or are you merely using it to associate yourself with a no longer existing authority? Do you even have the first idea what it means?" No. The watchman saw a man with enough armed followers to burn the place down around his ears and opened the door.
We live in a world that is mapped in terms fo more than geography. The calendar and the diary offer a sense of security and continuity. We make plans for tomorrow, next week, two years’ time. Electric light has banished the nightmares. Information is accessible and you can, if you want, check your facts. You can pick up the phone and talk to someone in another city to find out if the rumours of disaster are true. You can compare news reports, from a variety of media, to try and sift the truth.
These people didn't and couldn't.
In the dark beyond the fire's glow there were all the traditional monsters: the age-old earth demons that snuffle through the night reeking of death and lusting for flesh. And now there are newer enemies, men whose language they can't speak, who they don't understand, who have come to burn and destroy what little is left of their way of life. And just as the light isn't strong enough, there isn't enough information, only rumours and stories. Around small fires, on a hill top, in a ruined villa, by a lake side, in the shelter of the rebuilt walls of an ancient hill fort, they huddle near to the flames and warm themselves with stories of the war they have lost and a leader who won five battles, or eight battles, or was it twelve, who slew fifty or seventy or 960 of the enemy in one day, and the story grows, appropriates incidents, is overlaid with wish fulfilment and the "truth" fades and in the end the only truth is the truth of consolation to be passed on to children and grandchildren.
Monday, May 4, 2009
Holy Grail Found In Coventry! Or In search of the Real King Arthur or the Real Lady G..or the Real Robin Hood...
Or just real butter
So the arm of Saint Augustine of Hippo ended up in Coventry. Or an arm in a box that people thought was St Augustine’s. Perception being what counted. But did you know the Holy Grail was also found in Coventry?
According to my brittle and yellowing copy of the Courier Mail of Monday August 14, 1995 there’s a story headlined “Amateur Sleuth Traces Holy Grail”:
“Perhaps the most revered relic in Christian legend…..has been tracked down to an attic in a modest home in Coventry.”
Which had me going, but then the name Graham Phillips turned up so sadly that’s the end of that. Though I do have his book, and in it (p150) he says the owner lives in Rugby in Warwickshire…so the mystery continues….
Amateur sleuths keep sleuthing…conspiracy theorists of the world etcetc
When I first read versions of the Arthurian legend I was still in primary school and the idea of finding the Holy Grail, like finding Rider Haggard’s She, was very attractive.
These days I don’t understand it. (The grail part.. still not sure about Ayesha)
Nor do I understand the fascination with “The Real Arthur”. The story of Arthur and the Grail produced some of the most beautiful stories of the Middle ages. Patches of Lawman, the masterpiece of Gawain and the Green Knight, long stretches of the alliterative Morte Arthure. Until in Malory’s hands the story of the round table fellowship, its rise and fall, becomes something real and adult and troubling and very beautiful. An extended consideration of the way that even the most beautiful of ideals, upheld for the best of reasons, by the best of people, can not exceed the humanity of the participants.
Perhaps he was the last writer with the medieval understanding that the hero fails, dies and the failure is not a criticism of the ideal but a reality of life who could also believe in the flawed beauty of the human story as it had come down to him.
Perhaps the last writer to really take the story as one for adults.
But if you could find an Arthur who fought against the English incomers in the later fifth or early sixth century, and you interviewed him, he could tell you nothing about those stories.
This is going to be too long and its late. More later. Maybe a trip to Glastonbury first…..
So the arm of Saint Augustine of Hippo ended up in Coventry. Or an arm in a box that people thought was St Augustine’s. Perception being what counted. But did you know the Holy Grail was also found in Coventry?
According to my brittle and yellowing copy of the Courier Mail of Monday August 14, 1995 there’s a story headlined “Amateur Sleuth Traces Holy Grail”:
“Perhaps the most revered relic in Christian legend…..has been tracked down to an attic in a modest home in Coventry.”
Which had me going, but then the name Graham Phillips turned up so sadly that’s the end of that. Though I do have his book, and in it (p150) he says the owner lives in Rugby in Warwickshire…so the mystery continues….
Amateur sleuths keep sleuthing…conspiracy theorists of the world etcetc
When I first read versions of the Arthurian legend I was still in primary school and the idea of finding the Holy Grail, like finding Rider Haggard’s She, was very attractive.
These days I don’t understand it. (The grail part.. still not sure about Ayesha)
Nor do I understand the fascination with “The Real Arthur”. The story of Arthur and the Grail produced some of the most beautiful stories of the Middle ages. Patches of Lawman, the masterpiece of Gawain and the Green Knight, long stretches of the alliterative Morte Arthure. Until in Malory’s hands the story of the round table fellowship, its rise and fall, becomes something real and adult and troubling and very beautiful. An extended consideration of the way that even the most beautiful of ideals, upheld for the best of reasons, by the best of people, can not exceed the humanity of the participants.
Perhaps he was the last writer with the medieval understanding that the hero fails, dies and the failure is not a criticism of the ideal but a reality of life who could also believe in the flawed beauty of the human story as it had come down to him.
Perhaps the last writer to really take the story as one for adults.
But if you could find an Arthur who fought against the English incomers in the later fifth or early sixth century, and you interviewed him, he could tell you nothing about those stories.
This is going to be too long and its late. More later. Maybe a trip to Glastonbury first…..
Lady Godiva and me reviewed
http://happenstancepress.co.uk/joomla/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=232&Itemid=45
Only Six out of ten...not good enough at all: must do better next time.
Only Six out of ten...not good enough at all: must do better next time.
Saturday, May 2, 2009
Joyce, Syntax and another S.U.R.G.. meeting
Writing as performance. Reader as audience. Free to sit back and enjoy, or marvel at the skill, or use the experience as a free master class...a bit like listening to Martin Simpson playing the guitar...
This I love:
Grossbooted draymen rolled barrels dullthudding out of Prince's stores and bumped them up on the brewery float. On the brewery float bumped dullthudding barrels rolled by grossbooted draymen out of Prince's stores.
It's the grammatical slippage of dullthudding I think, as much as anything else. Exactly what it's doing in that first sentence is ambigious? It seems to have become an adjective in the second. The rhythm and sound seem near on perfect.
Which does raise the question: for someone who was so inventive with syntax, why was his poetry so dull?
Friday, May 1, 2009
The pleasure of reading...a view from outside the bunker
What the bunker mentality forgets, or denies:
The real pleasure of reading. Having just finished S/Z (a ludic masterpiece that was ludicrously enjoyable...Eagleton is right, some theory is far more entertaining, thought provoking and readable than a lot of modern fiction) I'm working my way carefully through Le Fanu, (though in no way trying to imitate Barthes. I think that's one inimitable performance) and reminding myself how much pleasure there is in simply reading something very slowly and carefully...in fact in paying attention to the texture of the text...;
One of the glories of great art (and yes,I do beleive in such a thing) is its ability to exceed the reach of the viewer/audience/reader so that each encounter with the same piece is a new one. Which requires a certain generosity on the part of the reader; a willingness to go along for the ride the first time with an open mind rather than to start by suspecting the thing in your hands or your ears or your eyes is infected;
And the fact that no poem or novel is compulsory outside the class room. And the default position is not to simply accept whatever ideology the text might be promoting. On this last point the following seems to be about right, though as I typed it out I wanted to change it to “he or she, himself/herself”.
Wislaw Szymborska:
“One more comment from the heart: I’m old fashioned and think that reading books is the most glorious pastime that humankind has yet devised. Homo Ludens dances, sings, produces meaningful gestures, strikes poses, dresses up, revels and performs elaborate rituals. I don’t wish to diminish the significance of these distractions-without them human life would pass in unimaginable monotony and possibly dispersion and defeat. But these are group activities above which drifts a more or less perceptible whiff of collective gymnastics. Homo Ludens with a book is free. At least as free as he’s capable of being. He himself makes up the rules of the game, which are subject only to his own curiosity. He’s permitted to read intelligent books, from which he will benefit, as well as stupid ones, from which he may also learn something. He can stop before finishing one book, if he wishes, while starting another at the end and working his way back to the beginning. He may laugh in the wrong places or stop short at words he’ll keep for a life time. And finally, he’s free-and no other hobby can promise this-to eavesdrop on Montaigne’s arguments or take a quick dip in the Mesozoic."
Wislawa Szymborska “nonrequired readings” which is a wonderful book full of wonder and the pleasure of reading.
The real pleasure of reading. Having just finished S/Z (a ludic masterpiece that was ludicrously enjoyable...Eagleton is right, some theory is far more entertaining, thought provoking and readable than a lot of modern fiction) I'm working my way carefully through Le Fanu, (though in no way trying to imitate Barthes. I think that's one inimitable performance) and reminding myself how much pleasure there is in simply reading something very slowly and carefully...in fact in paying attention to the texture of the text...;
One of the glories of great art (and yes,I do beleive in such a thing) is its ability to exceed the reach of the viewer/audience/reader so that each encounter with the same piece is a new one. Which requires a certain generosity on the part of the reader; a willingness to go along for the ride the first time with an open mind rather than to start by suspecting the thing in your hands or your ears or your eyes is infected;
And the fact that no poem or novel is compulsory outside the class room. And the default position is not to simply accept whatever ideology the text might be promoting. On this last point the following seems to be about right, though as I typed it out I wanted to change it to “he or she, himself/herself”.
Wislaw Szymborska:
“One more comment from the heart: I’m old fashioned and think that reading books is the most glorious pastime that humankind has yet devised. Homo Ludens dances, sings, produces meaningful gestures, strikes poses, dresses up, revels and performs elaborate rituals. I don’t wish to diminish the significance of these distractions-without them human life would pass in unimaginable monotony and possibly dispersion and defeat. But these are group activities above which drifts a more or less perceptible whiff of collective gymnastics. Homo Ludens with a book is free. At least as free as he’s capable of being. He himself makes up the rules of the game, which are subject only to his own curiosity. He’s permitted to read intelligent books, from which he will benefit, as well as stupid ones, from which he may also learn something. He can stop before finishing one book, if he wishes, while starting another at the end and working his way back to the beginning. He may laugh in the wrong places or stop short at words he’ll keep for a life time. And finally, he’s free-and no other hobby can promise this-to eavesdrop on Montaigne’s arguments or take a quick dip in the Mesozoic."
Wislawa Szymborska “nonrequired readings” which is a wonderful book full of wonder and the pleasure of reading.
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