Jeremy Hooker, Diary of a stroke. Shearsman (2016)

Jeremy Hooker, Diary of a stroke. Shearsman (2016)

 

Memory, narrative and identity. 

 

Are your memories like the panel of a cartoon, that’s been torn from the rest of the strip? A scene from a film where the credits have gone missing? Vague images glimpsed from the wrong angle, a collection of shade and colour and movement? What happens to them when you try to put them into words and tell them to someone who wasn’t involved? 

 

Beyond the obvious idea that writing memory is always a work of reconstruction, there is the lurking problem that although the event can be described in words, the writer is on the outside looking in. Whatever emotion that incident evoked at the time, or no matter how important it seems in retrospect, it slips away or is distorted in the attempt to write it. 

 

Freud claimed that some of his patients could not ‘narrate themselves into coherence’. And what is a memoire, if not a retrospective rearrangement of events to produce a coherent character who shares a name with the narrator? 

 

But the key term is ‘narrate’. We all have memories. But putting them into words, even for the most eloquent, is never straight forward.

 

The English poet and critic, Jeremy Hooker suffered a stroke in July 1999, and kept a journal of his experience, first in hospital then when recuperating, until his return to work in January 2001.

 

As the book progresses  the entries integrate record, observation and memory and gently develop into a memoire of his early years. The awareness of the problems of writing memory make this book far more interesting than a well-written memoire would be on its own. 

 

The book begins with short entries which record the world of the hospital, his return home, and his adjustments to a body that was no longer to be taken for granted. The entries record encounters with friends, old and new which provoke reflection, and Hooker, refusing to sentimentalise, is candid about himself and his life. However the book turns on his unexpected desire to write about his past. 

 

‘Since lying in hospital I have thought that I would like to write something-call it a memoire or autobiographical sketch-about my childhood…. I doubt I could do it formally since it would confront me with problems of public persona & literary occasion-problems in my own mind about my ‘rights’ as an author.  

What I might do , though, is give way to the impulse when it occurs and use this journal space , in which I feel most free as a writer, to sketch a memory or an impression. (P.93. November 10.)

 

For a writer who had refused the ‘confessional’ and ‘autobiographical’ in his own poetry the desire was not straight forward. How to avoid what he had called ‘the sludge of nostalgia?’ More significantly,  if a memory is a first person narrative, the writing of it becomes tangled in problems of subjectivity. In a previous essay, Hooker had reflected on ‘the lyric I’ and written ‘quite simply, I might look at a tree or any living thing and know its reality would always be beyond my words’. The past may be factual. But in narrating it, it becomes a thing, to be described, ‘to be always beyond words.’  

 

In the same essay he wrote:

 

…’One problem with Wordsworth’s famous definition of poetry as originating in emotion recollected in tranquillity is it’s tacit assumption of a stable ego in the act of recollection’. Against this he juxtaposes D.H. Lawrence’s ‘ If I say of myself, I am this, I am that!-then, I stick to it, I turn into a stupid fixed thing like a lamp post. I shall never know wherein lies my integrity, my individuality, my me.’

 

Comparing such disparate figures as Keats, and David Jones, he wrote: ‘Each involves self or soul as more process than fixed identity, as something one works with and realises in the making’.    

A memoir is not just a straight forward account of past events. It is the construction of one possible version of a life, a fixing of identity in retrospect. In Hooker’s case, an activity qualified by a critical awareness:

 

‘It seems to me that a lot of ‘inner experience’, offered as the subject of poetry, isn’t interesting. For a start it tends to be conventional, with more sameness (but less common depth) than its advocates are prepared to allow. The individual is a bourgeois concept , a commercial asset in a society given to buying and selling ‘lifestyle’ products. The person by contrast turns away from convention and instead of idolizing the psychological, as though it were a precious private property, is sensitive to the unique and relational aspects of human being.’ (p. 81. October 24)

 

He is therefore, wary. If our past is something we narrate into coherence, then what is a genuine memory? How much of our idea of our past is constructed around  stories other people have told us, or photographs we have seen. How do we know our memory isn’t a story we have told ourself so often we now accept it as something that ‘really did happen’.  In retrospect do we freight incidents and people with a significance they didn’t have at the time? 

 

One of his memories is off sitting in a car, waiting for his father, and sketching what he could see outside the window. The image becomes a symbol of what he’s not trying to achieve.

Often the memoire seems to the writer, looking out at a world that is ‘over there’, as if the world was a painting without people. Or that what mattered was his or her reflection in the glass. ‘But what I want to see is the life  out there, not my face reflected in the glass, or an empty landscape, but the quickness and the plenitude in this common place.’ 

 

 

As with Hooker’s other Journals, his reading and reflection are contained in the diary. During the period covered in Diary of a Stroke, he was also working on Imagining Wales and these two books complement each other. Imagining Wales is the publicly endorsed critical approach, Diary of A Stroke  contains a personal response to these writers that is no less interesting. For readers of his critical work, the journal references provide a perspective on these authors: these writers give him a way of orientating himself, or navigating his way through the experience. It is a model of literate critical reading in the best sense, of taking what can be learnt from books and folding them into his life.  

 

Hooker’s long engagement with the work of John Cowper Powys, David Jones and Richard Jeffreys, provide threads through the journal. Two of those writers  provide unusual models  for anyone writing about his or her past. In his Autobiography Powys carefully manufactured a version of himself. It’s an astonishing performance but he left his biographers the task of untangling the fact from fiction. Jefferies’s Story of my Heart is an autobiography mostly lacking in the kind of dated events one might expect. Hooker’s approach is less programmatic, more conventional but no less interesting

 

If you take into account class, geography and time, most childhoods, barring traumatic events, are similar. Like it or not, we are cliches. What makes Diary of a Stroke more than just an eloquent record of memory and recovery is Hooker’s reluctance to simply record his past. There’s an honest tension between the desire to write about memory; the critical sense that self-revelation is usually not that interesting to a third party, and an awareness of the technical difficulties of writing about the past that elevates the book above the merely self-referential and provides a stranger with much to think about. 

Ravenser Odd by Michael Daniels.

 

This is Michael Daniels’ first collection, the traditional slim pamphlet, with the added benefit that the publisher, Poets House Pamphlets, Oxford, has produced a fine object, printed on good paper, with understated art work to enhance the text.

 

A note informs the reader that Ravenser Odd first appeared as a sand or gravel bank at the mouth of the Humber in the early 13^th century. A settlement was established there. It enjoyed a bad reputation, until it was finally erased in a great storm in the 14^th. 

 

It’s the stuff of folk tales, made better by the fact it’s true, and while the enemies of the settlement might have seen its destruction as devine retribution, today as the note states, it’s easier to see it as a symbol of nature’s indifference to human concerns.  

 

The poems are all written in Terza Rima. Anyone who voluntarily writes in this form has to be admired for making their own life difficult, but the success of Daniels’ attempt is evident in the way the rhymes don’t intrude. The poems move smoothly, and there’s no sense that a rhyme has been forced or the lines padded to fit the form. The verse is spare, in keeping with the feel of medieval chronicle or folk tale.  

 

The sequence begins:

 

What is it to be held in mind

by someone else, to dwell as ghost

or presence there? The drowned recline

 

in chambered mud, yet still we host

them in our heads, subdued and dim.

It isn’t us who need them most.

 

Economically, Daniels moves from here to sketch in the development and final destruction of the place. Two passing ravens provide a bird’s eye view of the new land. Then there’s a feudal Lord; ‘…life was his to make the worse,/he was their breath, their bread, their meat’, the restless power of the sea, the gradual erosion of the land, until the dead are ‘liberated’ from their graves and washed ashore. The two ravens see the final calamity:

 

The people’s final prayer rose up,

petitioning their lonely god.

The ravens read their trembled lips

 

to scavenge scraps of uttered word,

then spat them back as raucous noise,

disemvolweling all they heard. 

 

 

This is a small impressive collection. The poet’s own website contains files of him reading his work, with evocative visual images to accompany the readings.

https://www.michaeldaniels.co.uk

 

 

 

Vortigern: history, fiction and the strange relationship between the imagined and the known. 1/3

Part one of three.

History.

I’ve finished the first draft of the story of Vortigern. And I’m still nagging away at what I can learn by trying to rewrite a medieval story. I’ve tracked the story of Vortigern and how it changes from Gildas, via Nennius to Geoffrey of Monmouth and Wace, to Laȝamon. (see previous posts on Vortigern)

Chapter one of my ‘versioning’ appeared in Long Poem Magazine, chapter two, three and four in the Brazen Head. 

To make the story work as a modern narrative, I’ve had to make changes. It’s the reasons for these that intrigue me.

But the more I do this, the more I’m beginning to believe that while there are obvious differences between the middle ages and now, if you strip away the technology, sometimes the differences are not as profound as they first seem.  

Take the twin ideas of ‘History’ and ‘Fiction’. It’s obvious twelfth century writers didn’t treat these ideas the same way we do. But then, who is the ‘we’ in that sentence. 

‘History’ revisited.

Laȝamon’s version of history, like all the other Medieval writers in my list, is a record of individuals and their actions. The Picts attack Britain because Vortigern betrayed them. Roman Britain falls because Vortigern can’t control his lust for Hengist’s daughter. 

A modern Historian might explain the fifth century in terms of ideology and economics, as the inevitable result of internal and external pressures working on a weakened western empire. They will debate migrations, elite take overs, continuity vs change etc. They are unlikely to look to the actions of a single individual for explanations.

Which brings home the nature of ‘History’ as a modern discipline. For all its basis in facts and evidence, it is still an attempt to narrate the past, but to narrate it in order to know it in a peculiar way. If it ever succeeds, ‘it’ will ‘know’ the fifth century in a way no one living in it ever did. Firstly because the fractured, localised experience of life in the fifth century cannot compete with the Historian’s overview. The written materials that do survive were written by people who could only write what they knew and what they knew was limited. 

Secondly, modern technology can measure time to a Zepto second: That's a decimal point followed by 20 zeroes and a 1, and it looks like this: 0.000 000 000 000 000 000 001. It’s unlikely that anyone is aware of time passing in such small increments. A modern ‘History’ of the fifth Century in Britain often seems to be based on the assumption that the past can be known with such objective precision. We have DNA testing, increasingly sophisticated dating techniques etc.etc. which leads to an increasing unwillingness to accept anything unless ‘scientifically proven’. And in extreme cases the strange attitude that says since there’s no evidence for roaming war bands in the archeological evidence there were no roaming war bands. 

But just as you can’t remember a zeptosecond that occurred last week, people living through the fifth century responded to what they thought they knew, not to the objective ‘truth’ of the situation. Modern 'history' may well prove them all to be deluded, and their writers were mistaken, exaggerating, or lying but that won't help us understand them. 

And before we dismiss Laȝamon’s approach as ‘medieval’ it would be instructive to compare his treatment of Vortigern with journalistic treatments of the recent Trump Presidency, or of Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, or even Scott Morrison. (I’m not going to do that, reading about these gentlemen is depressing enough without spending more time thinking about them than necessary.)  

Power, politics and current events are presented by the modern news media in terms of personalities. The systems that made a Mr. Trump or Mr. Johnson inevitable are rarely discussed. Their personality, actions, words are. Laȝamon and his audience would be completely at home. 

And (#2) before we dismiss the medieval writer for his willingness to include the obviously fantastical or irrational, some of the vociferous responses to the Government’s attempts to get everyone vaccinated against Covid might qualify the idea that we are living in a more rational age.

For most people ‘History’ as a discipline is something they brushed against at school. It’s not the way they think about the present or the past. 

And watching the state governments respond to the threat of Covid-19 in Australia, I’m not convinced that the actions and choices of the individual players aren’t capable of affecting history. 

In the next post, Fiction medieval and modern. 

Macbeth 2015

Macbeth 2015

Warning. From time to time one is guilty of opinionating in public. This is one of them. It’s long and bad tempered because I’m so tired of paying for films that are adaptations of ‘premodern’ texts which take my money and then insult my intelligence.

Another film adaptation of a Shakespearian play. The play Macbeth has been around for 400 years. There’s a library about it, and there have been numerous attempts to put that play on stage or on film and some have been creative, some have been misguided and some have been downright weird. 

There are versions: there is no ‘right’ version.  But why do so many modern adaptations require the audience to leave its brain at the door? Why are so many versions of early modern or pre-modern texts so often reductive to the point where you’d be forgiven for wondering if the filmmakers had ever bothered to think about the original. Why are they so unimaginative? There are exceptions. Brilliant exceptions, but they are so rare.

There’s probably two ways at looking at Macbeth (2015).

Does it live on its own, free of the original? Yes it does. As a film it looks beautiful, the acting is good, the story rocks along and it’s an entertaining ride. If you knew nothing about Macbeth, or ‘Macbeth’ this is an entertaining film as long as you leave your brain at the door.  They could have called it Macca the Slasher and no one would have cared: Macca goes Ape.

As an adaptation it’s a reading of the source, so it’s possible to ask what it does with the original, or what is suggests as a reading of the original? Answer: it’s awful.  It’s yet another mediocre piece dressed up with the usual marketing bullshit and cinema trickery which seems to miss the fact that 400 years ago Shakespeare didn’t insult the intelligence of his audience.

Think of that initial audience. They didn’t know the heart circulated the blood. Your average high school student who has being paying attention knows more astronomy and geography than they did. To find out what was wrong with you the doctor was just as liable to taste your urine or cast your horoscope.  America was a vague rumour to the west and Australia hadn’t been invented. Newton and his physics were over a century in the future.

But that original audience wasn’t stupid. In Macbeth Shakespeare made something that was a spectacle: even the stage version has weird sisters and sword fights and apparitions,  but the story works at whatever level you want to take it.  It works as spectacle and profound meditation. You can't exceed it or sum it up neatly. Whatever meaning or theme you find is always opening outwards into new possibilities. He also created a linguistic space where it was possible to think through and in language.  It’s not that Shakespeare wrote some memorable lines. His characters think through the language they use. Macbeth’s tortured syntax in the lead up to the murder, the way images cluster and echo each other, the way characters use their own particular sets of symbolism.  You can hear these things in a production. Duncan’s ornate syntax, the rhythm of the witches which sets them apart, Lady Madcbeth’s habitual use of the first person plural etc.etc.etc. So claiming that they respected the dialogue, without paying attention to how that dialogue works, is indicative of the problem.

Yes, it’s a play about an ambitious Scottish couple and the consequences of their ambition, but ambition is just the specific example: every one in that audience, at some stage of their life would stand where Macbeth did, in act one scene seven, knowing that the thing he or she most wanted was the one thing all sane reasoning and social conditioning said was wrong.  

The tragedy lies in the way he has to face the consequences of his decision, and the unraveling of the Macbeths’ relationship; they start joined at the hip and they both die alone regretting their actions. As Marjorie Garber pointed out, in the kind of easily available discussion in her book Shakespeare After All which should be the starting point for anyone thinking about twiddling with one of the plays: this is not about doing an act, but being done by it.

In the ‘making of the film’ on my Blue ray version the director says two things that are indicative of what’s wrong. The first is that he was more interested in the 11^th century Macbeth than in Shakespeare’s. It’s a great idea. Though why you’d still use Will’s words is a good question.

At which point the person behind the camera should have stopped him and said, and what did you do with that information? Did you make a film about someone called Macbeth set in the 11^th century?

A quick review of the History, which was not known to Shakespeare and is still very patchy:

Eleventh century Scotland was not a united kingdom but a number of smaller, competing ones. 9 of the ten ‘kings’ who ruled before Macbeth were murdered or killed in battle by the people who took over from them. Hereditary Kingship was not a feature of the time.

Duncan was not regarded as a Good King. He was seen as weak and his attempts at gaining military glory were disastrous. Macbeth’s claim to the throne was as good as Duncan’s and he could also claim that his wife was the granddaughter of a King.

Macbeth and the Scottish “earls”, including Banquo, rose against Duncan after his disastrous campaign in England. There is no sense that what Macbeth did was wrong or unusual. At the time of the Killing, Malcolm was nine years old. By law a King had to be at least 17. He and his mother and brother didn’t leave Scotland for two years.

Lady Macbeth was called Gruach. Her first husband was called Gillecomgain, a son of Duncan. Gillcomegain and Duncan’s Grandfather had killed Macbeth’s father. Lady Macbeth and Gillecomgain had a child, called Lulach. Gillecomgain was burnt to death in his fortress, possibly by Macbeth.  Macbeth married Gruach, who was also his cousin. He was twenty-eight when they married.

Macbeth ruled a united Scotland for 17 years. He was so secure of his position that he went on a pilgrimage to Rome

The first attempt by Siward to defeat him was unsuccessful. He was defeated in battle by Malcolm and Siward in July 1054.  Malcolm became King after the victory, but Macbeth continued to rule the northern part of Scotland until his death in battle against Malcolm in 1057.

Shakespeare did not know much, if any, of this.  

Think about what a leap of the imagination it would take to try and get inside that story. How strange and alien it must be to a modern audience. How thought provoking. And then imagine a couple with that kind of family history. How did they negotiate their relationship?  Or what it might be like to live in that world:  imagine what it might be like to ‘love’ someone knowing their chances of dying in their sleep were almost non existent, that there is no point in the day or night when you could simply relax and not fear an assassin. Where every time they left there was a fifty-fifty chance they might not make it back.

But part of the problem with so many film adaptations is a basic failure to imagine.

At the level of ‘History’ this film is botched.

At times they seemed to have played with the idea of it being about that 11^th century King.  Macbeth’s ‘castle’ where he kills Duncan is nothing but a large barn, which is probably about right, although it’s a barn with no wall or fence around it.  But then, abruptly heaving into the distance, there’s a much later medieval castle with cathedral like interiors. It’s a bit like a film about Drake leading the English Navy against the Spanish Armada in 1588 with RAF Spitfires appearing  to strafe the Spanish galleys.

Battles are ridiculously stylized and silly. They seem to happen in fog or with drifting smoke. There’s knowledge, readily available, about how 11^th century battles were fought and the weapons used in them. But here we have a Scottish 11^th Century Army in which everyone can afford a sword but not one shield or helmet is in evidence, even amongst the Norwegians.  

This does at least lead to one amusing moment when Macbeth says, ‘Before my body/ I throw my warlike shield’.  He doesn’t have one and neither does anyone else.

The idea of a teenage boy being out of place in an 11^th century army is just daft.  The idea of Macbeth being upset by this is even dafter.  Siward’s reaction to his son’s death at the end of the play should signal this.  When the ‘last reserves’ arrive, there’s not a farm implement amongst them.  

In one of the stranger moments of the film there’s a blink and you’ll miss it execution of the first Thane of Cawdor, by archers. But there are no archers in the battles.  The battles are random melees.  The English/Northumbrian army under Siward looks suspiciously like a group of monks on horseback. They should look like the English army in the Bayeux tapestry.  They should fight like the armies did less than ten years later at Fulford Gate and Stamford Bridge and Senlac.  If you want to ‘do’ the 11^th century do it.

Being pedantic again? No. Why do I have to leave my brain at the door?  So much time and technological know how went into this why couldn’t they get these things right?

The second thing I heard on the 'making of' was that Macbeth has PTSD. I’m not quoting directly. Because at that point my brain stalled …..

Why bother calling this film Macbeth?  

Shakespeare’s working method was to multiply or remove the motivations and causes he found in his sources.  This opens up his plays. It allows the audience room to move and it does not dictate meaning. You’re an adult it says: you make up your own mind. It’s rare to find modern films that do this.

The film begins with the Macbeths at the funeral of a child. So that ‘explains’ Mrs Macbeth. She’s lost a child. That’s why she does what she does. Simple.

As for Macbeth, well, apparently he has PTSD. And that explains everything too, so it’s all good and neat.  And you don’t have to think or feel, just watch the pretty film.

Ignore the dodgy practice of analyzing people who have been dead for ten centuries using modern categories that probably don’t make sense when applied to the past.  The distinction between soldier and civilian in the 11^th century was meaningless. Ignore the desire to ‘explain’. Freud was guilty of this, he wanted to “solve the problem of Hamlet” and the dead child explanation for Lady M’s actions  turns up in a 1916 essay of his.

Instead ask why didn’t someone stop and consider what happens when you make a reductive  interpretation of the play that isn’t in the play and impose it on the material.

 Macbeth has PTSD. Therefore he does what he does.  The story now takes place ‘over there’ at several removes from the audience.  Not only are we not about to be drafted into an 11^th century battle, most of us don’t have PTSD.  We might sympathise with those that do, but the universal claims of the original, the sense of choices and their consequences that everyone has to face, the limitations of morality, the way wishful thinking can misinterpret or misread (something both Duncan and Macbeth are guilty of), all this has been vaporized and replaced by what?

MacBeth is on the battlefield killing, Afterwards doing stuff with dead and wounded bodies you’d expect other people to be doing.  Then he’s screwing his wife on what seems to be an altar in a chapel, then he’s butchering Duncan in a pointless frenzy and then he’s going weird in a room. People die. Lady Macbeth rides across the countryside and cries. Then she dies. Then Macbeth dies.

There is no possibility of sympathy or horror.  He’s no longer a believable or interesting person; he’s a virtual character in yet another silly hack fest.  It’s a terrible waste of the actors and the director

There’s no initial nobility, there’s no choice made consciously leading to horrific personal and social consequences.  There’s no distinction between the Macbeths in their reactions to what they’ve done. It seems that Lady M is distraught because Macca’s gone nuts. There’s no sense of her terrible slow realization of her guilt.

Another thing Polanski did well in comparison was to show the way Macbeth rots Scotland out from the centre. There’s no noble Duncan: Duncan has basically disappeared. Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking has gone, the Hubble bubble scene has gone. The banquet scene is botched and the death of Lady Macduff and her family changed from the menace and horror of the original (which even Polanski got right, despite the fact it has one of Shakespeare’s most cringe worthy lines) to some twisted and unbelievable piece of brutal nonsense in which they are tied to stakes and burnt with lady Macbeth looking on.  

It says something about the film that perhaps the most memorable scene is the one where MacDuff is told his wife and children are dead.  The actors are given space to act, the lines work, they’ve  worked for four hundred years and it suddenly becomes believable. And then its back to nonsense:

Burnham Wood becomes burning wood.

So why then, to wrap up this overlong grumble, given all the brilliant technical skill available, given the fine actors and the budgets and the skill of the director can’t we have a pre modern story told with intelligence and imagination which credits an audience with imagination and encourages it to use it?

 

The car story

Rural Ireland in the 1930s.

Late at night, or early in the morning two brothers walking home from a party, they decide to take the short cut over the fields rather than the long way by the winding cart track someone’s tried to dignify by calling a road.

So over the fields by moonlight, not drunk, perhaps not entirely sober, they come to a place where they have to choose: the short short cut leads directly to their farm through a copse of trees, but the elder brother had seen something in there, once, on his way home late at night, and though he arrived home white as a sheet he never told anyone what he saw and he refuses to go through it. So they take the longer short cut, which takes them over hill and through the fields.

And they hear the unmistakable, (because still rare) sound of a car. Intrigued they follow the noise til they get to the “Top Field”, and there is a car, driving very slowly round the field.

Later, they will argue over the colour: one says white, the other says silver…both agree it was too dark to see the driver or if
there were any passengers.

Spooked, they skirt the field and hurry home. Next morning, over breakfast, they tell their father, who laughs at them. He points out that you couldn’t get a car into the top field, it’s only accessible on foot through the field below it and the only entrance is small and kept locked to keep the cattle and the horses out.

The brothers do their work then agree to go back, and when they return to the Top Field, they realise their father is right. It would be impossible to drive a car into that field.

But when they go closer, they see the unmistakable sign of car tires, making a circle inside the field, with no break for entrance or exit.

Just that image: a pale car, in the dark, slowly circling the field.

They refused to work the Top Field near dark for years afterwards.

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…..

Anno 2009. Her Bligh rice onfeng

So Qld elects the first woman premier in Australian history...bout time too.(And without the weird Hilary Clinton I'm a woman, you're a woman, why aren't you voting for me ploy.)
But that phrase from the Chronicle, in this year x came to power/acquired the Kingdom/come into the ruler ship...reveals the problem not so much of translation but of understanding.
Imagine Godwin or Leofric, Harold or William the Bastard, resurrected to watch the election campaign. They were astute men used to the getting of power. But would they have had a chance of understanding or appreciating what was happening? The juxtaposition, the image of them sitting in the commentary box sending dispatches home as the election unfolds, reveals the problem.
Those nouns and verbs in Old English which describe power can be easily translated into modern English. And t'other way round. You could explain things like Parliaments in terms of Witan or Moot, and the idea of election wouldn't have been too alien (certainly not to Harold). But the translations mask the realities. To rule, to govern, a kingdom, a nation, a state, a King, even "to be elected" don't mean the same thing now as then, can't mean the same thing now as then.
SO our encounter with the past, which is irremediably other, is domesticated and familiarised simply though the effect of language. Not just the vocabulary but the syntax too, of which much more later.
Hardly an original thought, but enough for a Sunday morning...
So Qld elects the first woman premier in Australian history...bout time too.(I like that, said Offa, sing it again!)

Home seen through a stereoscope.

In the Herbert there’s a Victorian Stereoscope. You look through the eye piece at two almost identical pictures and the lens moves them together so that you see the scene in three d.

For anyone who either grows up in a migrant community or migrates, Home is always an odd word. We could get the bus home from the library and my father would tell me stories about home which were about a totally different place.

So the slide labeled “home” is not two identical scenes that can be transposed over each other to give an illusion of depth, but two completely different pictures linked by the accidents of biography. The place I came from, personalized with my own life stories, by the fact that experiences happen somewhere and memories of that place are coloured by the memory of the experience. Coventry my not be the most beautiful city on the planet but a lot of good things happened there. "Home" where I grew up, forever “back” in past tense.

And home. Where I live now.

When I look through the eye piece at the slide labeled Home, instead of one three d picture, I see a strange imposition of one scene over the other, so neither can be seen entirely clearly. I used to think this was a bad thing.

Now I think it's an interesting perspective.

(The picture of the stereo scope I found at: http://cnx.org/content/m13784/latest/

Those good old days

Urm. SO...the night of the launch...it's literally freezing. We get a taxi into town because anyway ...the taxi driver is acting very oddly. He draws up outside the house and watches us come out…doesn't open his door at first...Turns out, according to him, the new game in town is to rob taxi drivers, and to wait outside a residential address, pretend it yours, and then beat up the driver and run away....so he says: “if I do not see the door open, I do not take the fare.” And for the next ten minutes he tells us horror stories from the day to day life of a Coventry cabby.

Which is awful except…our driver is Asian, wears a turban, speaks with a thick Asian accent and he keeps denigrating "these migrants'. He’s not the first or last person we’ll meet who will repeat this incongruous refrain. I still remember the shock the first time I heard two Irishmen in Coventry talking about “these Bloody Migrants”.

Our driver, like so many other people we’d meet over a “certain age” keeps talking about the Good Old Days. You know the refrain? When it was safe and everyone was friendly and loving and gave each other flowers and chocolates not just before during and after sex but when they met as casual strangers cycling to work in the factories, a book of poetry balanced on the handle bars because everyone was so much more literate then than now…having left their doors unlocked because no one would dream of breaking in while granny was making her home made scones and little lullubelle was playing carelessly in the road with a host of snotty nosed but endearing urchins because pedophilia hadn’t been invented…...unlike these days when those bloody knife wielding migrants come and take our jobs and get our daughters pregnant.....I exaggerate a little...but it went on like that until it dawned on me that I was there in them good old days.

Back in de good ole days on the first night of my job as a barman I was told I could have bottle money: 26p in drink or takeaway. My friend who had got me the job, handed me a bottle of lemonade. I explained I didn’t like lemonade. He explained that given the route we were walking home, the lemonade would make a good weapon if we were attacked….back in de good ole days.
True, there were jobs, but have you ever seen a car production line before the process was automated? Or did he mean before I was born, when the Germans were dropping bombs on everyone?


One of the problems with travel is that you're at the mercy of other people's perceptions. You tend to rely on their version of the place because you have no version of your own to measure it against. Which is equally true of history. Trying to work out values and beliefs by reading the few remaining documents is a bit like trying to learn the road rules by watching how people drive.

Imagine how different the world was.

No photographs. No recorded voices. No twenty four hour news feed. No global geography worth the name. How limited knowledge and how awkward its diffusion. How poor its chances of survival.

The fact we even know there was a woman called Godgifu seems miraculous.

Unless you were a member of the court, you wouldn’t even know what the king looked like. The possibility of hearing his biological voice would be minimal. The families settled around Coventry would know the Earl and his wife, but that would be familiarity. How important context would be. How crucial the personalized links that verify your identity. Why your social role was such a definition.

And then think of how strange the world. Imagine distance measured by effort and time with no global context and no predictability. Drop an educated person down on the world somewhere and tell them where they are, and they’d have a sense of what lies in each direction. But for someone in Coventry? If you went that way you reached Winchester, or London, and if you kept going, the coast, and France and then the pilgrim routes. That way, north, York, the sea lanes to Denmark. Vague cosmologies; detailed where the route is personally known, vague where it’s only hearsay. And the world beyond the known route, fading into vagueness. Peopled by strange possibilities.

Everything passed by word of mouth and stored in human memory. So the man who tells you about the things he saw when he was traveling, passed on in a game of Chinese whispers, with no way of checking the truth or the source.

The traveler who comes to your monastery and says…have you heard about the Earl’s wife. Have you heard what she did over in Coventry?