Heron Priest

The mention of herons in my poem yesterday set me thinking generally about herons in poetry. Immediately Dylan Thomas came to mind. Herons haunt several of his poems, but I suppose his most famous heron name check is in the heartstoppingly felicitous phrase mussel pooled and heron priested shore from one of his finest poems, Poem in October.

Next I thought of Denise Levertov and her 2 poems Heron (I) and Heron (II) from Evening Train. In one of these poems she describes the heron's legato arabesque of the neck. I know there are many other poems about herons or which reference herons in passing - and I'd love to hear from anyone who knows an especially beautiful heron poem. I myself once wrote a couple of yang and yin-type heron haiku, though I wouldn't single them out as of any particular literary merit:

heron priest
with pointed beak
penetrates fish hearts

but heron priestess
plumbs their souls
with piercing eyes

However what all this has been leading up to is a heron poem by the very fine Scottish lyrical-political-nature poet Sorley MacLean (1911-1996), who deserves to be much better known in England - and in the rest of the world. It's true that he wrote in Gaelic by choice, which could make him slightly inaccessible you might think - but I'm fairly sure that almost all his poems have been translated by himself very beautifully into English. Certainly his book of Collected Poems O Choille Gu Bearradh (From Wood To Ridge) - which I bought from a petrol station near Portree on the Isle of Skye a few years ago - has dual texts in both Gaelic and English side by side.

MacLean was born in 1911 off the coast of Skye on the small island of Raasay, where Gaelic was his first language. He went to the University of Edinburgh in 1929 and was wounded 3 times serving for the British Army in North Africa during WWII. Having rejected the teachings of Scottish Presbyterianism, he turned to the politics of the far left. One of the first poems he ever wrote was called A' Chorra-Ghridheach (The Heron). These are the last 3 stanzas:

What is my thought above the heron's?
The loveliness of the moon and the restless sea,
food and sleep and dream,
brain and flesh and temptation.

Her dream of rapture with one thrust
coming in its season without stint,
without sorrow, but with one delight,
the straight, unbending law of herons.

My dream exercised with sorrow,
broken, awry, with the glitter of temptation,
wounded, morose, with but one sparkle,
brain, heart and love troubled.

What a wonderful, absolutely on-the-nail contrast between the instinctive, unreflecting, untroubled animal world and the opposite human domain. And remember, this is a translation, so much of its original, poetic glory is lost...

In conclusion I'd like to end with some of my favourite Sorley MacLean lines, the final 2 verses of his magnificent poem Coilltean Ratharsai (The Woods Of Raasay):

There is no knowledge of the course
of the crooked veering of the heart,
and there is no knowledge of the damage
to which its aim unwittingly comes.

There is no knowledge, no knowledge,
of the final end of each pursuit,
nor of the subtlety of the bends
with which it loses its course.

Many thanks to Loren Webster for letting me use his superb heron photo.

The Mysterious Nature Of Thought

As hesitant buds in spring

burst suddenly into rapture;

As young children,

clouded by the clock's confusion,

learn slowly how to separate

the hours and minutes;

As climbers gather themselves

into a still centre,

into diamond-hard stasis,

before that final fluid move;

As sentinel herons

in gnomic contemplation guard

the ever changing stream,

then flap stiffly off...

Your gaze elsewhere...

Your thoughts, like drifts of kelp,

washed up on the strandline,

then rescued by incoming tide,

float free...

A Walk On The Wild Side

In Berlin, by the Wall/You were five foot ten inches tall/It was very nice/Candlelight and Dubonnet on ice Berlin LOU REED

I've got a BA in dope but a PhD in soul LOU REED

There aren't many masterpieces in the rock opera genre. Unfortunately so many stagings of rock concept albums are unmitigated disasters. The whole form - promising so much as it did with The Who's Tommy and Quadrophenia - became unbearably diluted and commercial in the so-called rock musicals of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice. The more elaborate and baroque these would-be-classical rock extravaganzas are, the bigger they fail - witness Pink Floyd's The Wall or over-the-top The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway by Genesis.

Therefore Lou Reed's Berlin is a welcome relief from all this overblown froth. Not that there's much of the rock opera about it. It's more of a Kurt Weill/Brechtian song cycle. But with even more depressing bits! Fantastic! I loved it. I was aware of the history - how Reed had given up on the idea of ever staging it after a critical panning in the early 1970s. How it had left everyone nonplussed after the iconic Transformer album. How artist, film director and Reed's friend Julian Schnabel (check out his recent film The Diving Bell And The Butterfly) had become obsessed with the work early on.

Schnabel created the film backdrop to the performance of Berlin we saw in Nottingham's Royal Concert Hall on Thursday - with its Chinese prints superimposing the story of drug-addicted prostitute Caroline (played by Roman Polanski's wife, actress Emmanuelle Seigner). Lou Reed himself, lean and gangly in jeans and red T-shirt, delivered as coolly as ever those devastatingly deadpan, ironic, understated lyrics. The horrors he leaves out reverberate even more than what he actually says.

It's easy to forget, amid all this present-day 60s nostalgia, how Lou Reed with the Velvet Underground created a necessary antidote to the stars-in-their-eyes hippie generation (don't get me wrong, I was one of them). His stark musical vignettes of street low-life showed the flipside of flower-power idealism.

Following a standing ovation came utterly stunning encores of Satellite of Love and Rock And Roll, and an emotive new song, The Power of The Heart. A wonderful, unforgettable evening.

If Music Be The Food Of Love, Play On

Music, the greatest good that mortals know, And all of heaven we have below. -- Joseph Addison

Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness. -- Maya Angelou

Music is either good or bad, and it's got to be learned. You got to have balance. -- Louis Armstrong

Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life. -- Berthold Auerbach

The aim and final end of all music should be none other than the glory of God and the refreshment of the soul. -- Johann Sebastian Bach

Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life. -- Ludwig van Beethoven

Music - The one incorporeal entrance into the higher world of knowledge which comprehends mankind but which mankind cannot comprehend. -- Ludwig van Beethoven

Music can change the world. -- Ludwig Van Beethoven

Music can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable. -- Leonard Bernstein

Music has to breathe and sweat. You have to play it live. -- James Brown

Music is well said to be the speech of angels. -- Thomas Carlyle

All music comes from God. -- Johnny Cash

If you learn music, you'll learn most all there is to know. -- Edgar Cayce

Music is nothing separate from me. It is me... You'd have to remove the music surgically. -- Ray Charles

Good music is good no matter what kind of music it is. -- Miles Davis

There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music. -- George Eliot

You are the music while the music lasts. -- T. S. Eliot

We need magic, and bliss, and power, myth, and celebration and religion in our lives, and music is a good way to encapsulate a lot of it. -- Jerry Garcia

Music is the language of the spirit. It opens the secret of life bringing peace, abolishing strife. -- Kahlil Gibran

When people hear good music, it makes them homesick for something they never had and never will have. -- Edgar Watson Howe

Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossile to be silent. -- Victor Hugo

The history of a people is found in its songs. -- George Jellinek

Music is the vernacular of the human soul. -- Geoffrey Latham

It requires wisdom to understand wisdom; the music is nothing if the audience is deaf. -- Walter J. Lippmann

Just as certain selections of music will nourish your physical body and your emotional layer, so other musical works will bring greater health to your mind. -- Hal A. Lingerman

Music is the harmonious voice of creation; an echo of the invisible world. -- Giuseppe Mazzini

Music is a beautiful opiate, if you don't take it too seriously. -- Henry Miller

I started making music because I could. -- Alanis Morissette

Music helps you find the truths you must bring into the rest of your life. -- Alanis Morissette

Music is spiritual. The music business is not. -- Van Morrison

Like everything else in nature, music is a becoming, and it becomes its full self, when its sounds and laws are used by intelligent man for the production of harmony, and so made the vehicle of emotion and thought. -- Theodore Mungers

Without music life would be a mistake. -- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

In music the passions enjoy themselves. -- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Music is your own experience, your own thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn. They teach you there's a boundary line to music. But, man, there's no boundary line to art. -- Charlie Parker

Music should be something that makes you gotta move, inside or outside. -- Elvis Presley

It's the music that kept us all intact, kept us from going crazy. -- Lou Reed

The music business was not safe, but it was FUN. It was like falling in love with a woman you know is bad for you, but you love every minute with her, anyway. -- Lionel Richie

Music should never be harmless. -- Robbie Robertson

Give me a laundry list and I'll set it to music. -- Gioacchino Antonio Rossini

All music is important if it comes from the heart. -- Carlos Santana

Music is the key to the female heart. -- Johann G. Seume

The best music... is essentially there to provide you something to face the world with. -- Bruce Springsteen

All I try to do is write music that feels meaningful to me, that has commitment and passion behind it. -- Bruce Springsteen

In music one must think with the heart and feel with the brain. --George Szell

When I hear music, I fear no danger. I am invulnerable. I see no foe. I am related to the earliest times, and to the latest. -- Henry David Thoreau

For heights and depths no words can reach, music is the soul's own speech. -- Unknown

Most of us go to our grave with our music still inside of us. -- Unknown

I believe in the power of music. To me, it isn't just a fad. This is a positive thing. -- Eddie Vedder

Music at its essence is what gives us memories. -- Stevie Wonder

There's a basic rule which runs through all kinds of music, kind of an unwritten rule. I don't know what it is. But I've got it. -- Ron Wood

Thanks to Danielle Hollister at EzineArticles.com for this list of Top 50 Music Quotations.

Reckless Eric

...I got a man with a slow hand/I got a lover with an easy touch/I found somebody who will spend some time/Not come and go in a heated rush Slow Hand THE POINTER SISTERS

The man variously called God, Slowhand, Del or Derek played Nottingham's Trent FM Arena last night. At 6.30 pm we spontaneously decided to go and see him. After all, it's not every day that the greatest blues-rock guitarist in the world performs just down the road. We'd only heard him live once before - guesting briefly at an early 1990s Bob Dylan gig at the Hammersmith Odeon (now Apollo). We managed to buy from the box office a couple of decent tickets for tiered seats half-way down the arena and to the left of the stage. It was pretty full, though there were some empty rows of seats near the back. (I believe it's more or less sold out for Dolly Parton in July.) It's a smaller space than many of the big concert stadia and all the better for it. I don't really like this kind of impersonal, unatmospheric aircraft hangar-like venue - though what choice have you got? The sound system was excellent and Clapton's pure, crystal-clear, unmistakable guitar licks soared sublimely heavenwards. Perhaps not as spiritual as Carlos Santana, but beautiful nonetheless. Clapton himself remained rather cool and inscrutable, except when Robert Randolph joined him on virtuoso pedal steel guitar in a blazing encore of Muddy Waters' Got My Mojo Working. The audience remained comatose throughout, but woke up near the end for the usual Clapton killer finale of Wonderful Tonight, Layla and Cocaine. And now it's Lou Reed to look forward to on Thursday. This live music obsession is becoming a drug...

Real, Live Music

Though I must admit I wouldn't go to the ends of the earth to see ballet, I do like the Creative Arts in general. Above all I feel a special love for and affinity with music. For me, music is a direct, immediate gateway to the Divine. But it's got to be real, live music to have this effect. Listening to CDs, as enjoyable as this is, just isn't the same thing at all.

We're surrounded by music a lot of the time - in shops and in lifts, on radio, film and TV - but all this is recorded music, music as wallpaper and background hum. It's frustrating how little we do experience the real, live sound. And when we do we're overwhelmed. Live music - whether it's raga or reggae, classical or country - is a quite different beast from the ersatz, digitally smoothed out, watered down versions of music we constantly hear on ipod and car radio. Somehow during the recording process the heart's been ripped out of it.

When we do get to hear the real thing, it can be shockingly powerful - visceral, compelling, violently emotional, spiritually calming. And hearteningly imperfect. Just listen live to Nina Simone attacking the piano like a revolutionary with a machine gun (sadly no chance to hear her any more), to Cara Dillon melting before your very eyes into the spiritual Celtic Twilight, to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra skewering your soul with that gorgeous melody from the Fourth Movement of Brahms' First Symphony. These live performances can be unforgettable.

In its recorded form, music is good, and it's better than nothing, and it's all we have most of the time. But track down the live stuff, as we did recently in Southwell and Leicester, and the experience can be profound, even life-changing. Each live performance is a one-off, like a piece of theatre. A once-only event, precious in its fleeting uniqueness.

It's Lou Reed in Nottingham this Thursday. I'm looking forward to it...

David Constantine Reads His Own Poem 'Watching For Dolphins'

An Apologia

Maybe they'll get me and maybe they won't/But not tonight and it won't be here/There are things I could say but I don't/I know the mercy of God must be near Standing In The Doorway from Time Out Of Mind BOB DYLAN

I'm beginning to hear voices and there's no one around Cold Irons Bound from Time Out Of Mind BOB DYLAN

Everything has its downside. We fall in love; we fall out of love. We go on holiday - and catch a virus on the plane coming home. We climb a mountain - and on reaching the summit realise it's the wrong mountain. Likewise there's blogging heaven, and there's blogging hell.

A few weeks ago I descended for a time into blogging hell. A unique set of personal circumstances - which I won't go into - tipped me over the edge for a while. Believe me, given the conditions, we can all go there more easily than you may think. It's not a happy place. I experienced very quickly a kind of madness, insanity, unreason - call it what you will - spiced with an unpleasant dose of paranoia. It took about a week to crawl slowly out of the abyss and regain a more balanced viewpoint. Now I can hardly identify myself as the person I was then.

Scary, or what? Well, perhaps not so scary. Best to talk about it, not conceal it. Admit that all of us are sometimes nearer the brink than we care to believe. The inherent dangers in blogging are misinterpretation and drawing connections where non exist. Mistaking virtual reality for reality and vice versa. We have only the written word to go on, often spontaneously given - and the written word acquires a primary and exaggerated importance in a blogworld lacking facial expressions, body language, spoken intonation.

So if at any point during this time I unwittingly offended, confused or upset any one, I'm sorry. It was not intentional.

Mea culpa.

David Constantine

Sometimes we are fortunate enough to encounter, at just the right young and impressionable age, an influential teacher or educator in our lives. If we are unlucky, this person may turn out to be a Miss Jean Brodie. I was lucky. For this mentor in my own life was David Constantine - university lecturer, German scholar, translator and poet. This man transformed the way I thought about texts and felt about literature. Or perhaps he (in the true sense of the word 'educate' - from the Latin 'educare', meaning 'to bring out') awoke and germinated what was already within. His influence remains strongly with me even now, and I will always be grateful for it. His lectures and seminars on Goethe, on Kleist, on Hölderlin, on Büchner, on Keats, on Romantic poetry, were a revelation. Perhaps many of us have a similar story?

Among poetry circles Constantine is now very well known. He's a mainstay of the Bloodaxe poetry catalogue, and is currently working on a translation of Faust Part Two for Penguin Books (Part One was published in 2004 and is definitive). I've recently read his superb translation of another work by Goethe, Elective Affinities, that startlingly cynical early 19th century novel about order and chaos, fate and free will. Bloodaxe published his Collected Poems in 2004 and this is one of my many favourite poems from it. You can easily trace his homage to Wordsworth's Prelude in this wonderful poem.

Estuarine

Big river giving up what made it

It. No fighting visible

But all the colossal loss of self

Flat silent under a hemisphere

Of stillness. Then I'd only been

Three or four years on the dry land

Still wrapped in native wonder. I recall

This much: a level the lowest possible above

The sea and it

Was greening gold, sheep safely grazed, the lark

And curlew signed it differently, water

Holed and threaded it so that it blinked between

More dry than wet, more wet than dry,

An earth dissolving into steppingtufts and mud, the water

Salting. How I loved

My game of pondering a route

Dryfoot and intricate to the farthest out. I thought myself

Out there where the wavering decided on

The sea, the river,

Biggest imaginable, lapsed without any trace

And on the brink of guessing at a place

Of nowhere, nothing, no one evermore

I reached up for love's

Always waiting to be reached for hand.

I would also strongly recommend Constantine's book of short stories Under The Dam (2005).

Celebrating The Mystery

I can't praise Denise Levertov's New & Selected Essays (New Directions, 1992) highly enough. The collection contains 25 simply stunning essays of literary criticism and writings on the creative imagination and the poetic process. Really you have to read the whole essay to understand fully what she means, but Levertov says this about mystery and imagination in concluding A Poet's View:

This acknowledgement, and celebration, of mystery probably constitutes the most consistent theme of my poetry from its very beginnings. Because it is a matter of which I am conscious, it is possible, however imprecisely, to call it an intellectual position; but it is one which emphasizes the incapacity of reason alone (much though I delight in elegant logic) to comprehend experience, and considers Imagination the chief of human faculties. It must therefore be by the exercise of that faculty that one moves toward faith, and possibly by its failure that one rejects it as delusion. Poems present their testimony as circumstantial evidences, not as closing argument. Where Wallace Stevens says, 'God and the imagination are one', I would say that the imagination, which synergizes intellect, emotion and instinct, is the perceptive organ through which it is possible, though not inevitable, to experience God.

Levertov defines her poetic stance quite admirably and succinctly; I don't think I've ever read, except in Coleridge or Eliot, a better exposition of the subtle connections between logical intellect, mysterious imagination, faith and God.

The Enabling Voice

Recently Loren Webster has been writing about the poetry of Denise Levertov. I like the reflective, searching poems of Levertov very much, and am familiar with her Selected Poems which takes one up to 1982, and the collections Oblique Prayers (1984), A Door In The Hive/Evening Train (published both together in the one book by Bloodaxe in 1993), Sands Of The Well (1996) and her final posthumous collection This Great Unknowing (1999). I hesitate to call this last collection 'mystical' (though mystical it undoubtedly is) because as ever she flits restlessly from God to politics, and from landscape to social comment - with even a bit of humour thrown in.

Levertov is not a poet of anthology pieces, stand-out, stand-alone poems or killer one-liners. As Loren hints, it would be hard to recall a single poem of hers which memorably burns itself into the mind with scorching imagery or verbal pyrotechnics - like some of Sylvia Plath's poems, for instance. In a sense her work is rather more interesting than that. I think you've got to consider her total oeuvre, read a lot of it and let it gradually seep into your consciousness. It seems to me her poems are very much works in progress or works on a continuum. We travel with her from poem to poem, collection to collection, as she observes this, reflects on that, is light-hearted about this, deadly serious about that, feels anger and despair about war and the suffering of innocent people, and is always acutely tuned in to the world of the spirit. She does not set herself up as any kind of poetic seer or sage; instead she sincerely shares with us her own doubts and questions and reflections (which are often our own doubts and questions and reflections) and attempts to make sense of and clarify them. Some of her poems are quite clear and plain; others are mysterious and more 'difficult'. Just as life itself can be both simple and complicated. Sometimes both at the same time.

Since I've been talking myself about Rilke lately, here's Levertov's poem To Rilke from A Door In The Hive (the beehive was an important image for Rilke). I suppose this is one of her more mysterious and elusive poems. I think it's quite beautiful in its opaque clarity. It is dream-like, parable-like, and contains the paradox of voiceless speech or eloquent silence at its centre. (It helps to know a little about Rilke to understand the poem.)

To Rilke

Once, in dream,
the boat
pushed off from the shore.
You at the prow were the man -
all voice, though silent - who bound
rowers and voyagers to the needful journey,
the veiled distance, imperative mystery.

All the crouched effort,
creak of oarlocks, odor of sweat,
sound of waters
running against us
was transcended: your gaze
held as we crossed. Its dragonfly blue
restored to us
a shimmering destination.

I had not read yet of your Nile journey,
the enabling voice
drawing that boat upstream in your parable.
Strange that I knew
your silence was just such a song.

Soup And A Curry

Yes, food - to continue the theme of the last post. I'm passionate about it. I love shopping for food, preparing it, cooking it, eating it. Even growing it. I started the vegetable garden very late this year - too late for the usual onions and potatoes I normally plant - but the runner beans, courgettes and sweetcorn are now coming up nicely.

It always amazes me how, at a time when we know so much about diet, nutrition and the direct relation between good food and good health, at a time when we're awash with cookery books and TV programmes, we're still a nation of instant frozen meal buyers and consumers of mediocre, fattening pub-chain fodder and crap takeaways.

Proper food needn't take an age to cook in the evenings - quick home-made soups, stir-fries, fish dishes and scores of other recipes can be ready in half-an-hour. Only yesterday I made a delicious soup by simmering in some stock a couple of potatoes, a couple of carrots, some runner beans, some mushrooms, a pile of shredded cabbage, some celeriac and loads of celery. A little or a lot of seasoning depending on your taste, a quick whizz after the vegetables have softened - and you have a fresh, tasty vegetable soup which can't possibly be reproduced in a packet or tin.

Even dishes like curries can be quick (though some Goan friends we once knew seemed to take all day to prepare theirs). Here's a recipe for chicken bhuna I often make. Raid your spice cupboard and prepare a marinade of yoghurt, lemon juice, garlic, turmeric, paprika, ground cumin, ground chilli, crushed cardamom (remove the husk first) and salt. Quantities are very much up to you. Experiment to find the amount of each spice you like. Add to the marinade strips or cubes of fresh, uncooked chicken and leave (several hours in the fridge would be ideal but I can never be bothered). Meanwhile fry some onion in a pan, add some rice (pilau is preferable but any rice will do) and also garlic, cardamom pods, fennel seeds and a cinnamon stick for flavouring, then pour in cold water to the level of 1 inch above the rice. Boil for 5 minutes, then cover with a lid and leave for 20 minutes. This will give you soft, steamed, spicy, flavoursome rice. You then serve this with the marinade-coated chicken you'll have fried 10 minutes beforehand. If you want, you can sprinkle garam masala and chopped coriander over the cooked chicken. And accompany with warm naan bread and a cucumber salad. Absolutely delicious.

Grumpy Old Culinary Git

I'm fed up with restaurants. Not that we eat out a lot. But lately we have done so rather more than usual - mainly to celebrate various birthdays. And I must say I was disappointed. I mean, for £120, 3 people have a right to expect something slightly memorable for their money (or, to be exact, my money in this case). I shan't name the restaurant, but it's got a reputation as being one of the best round here. It's supposed to be French, though I didn't see much evidence of this on the menu.

As seems the custom in so many eateries in these remote parts of Lincs and Notts, the food was finicky, poncey, minutely portioned and 'artistically' arranged in little dabs and squiggles around the plate. (Is it that we haven't moved on from nouvelle cuisine here in the backwoods - or is it that nouvelle cuisine has come back into fashion and I hadn't noticed? God only knows.)

And then there's the wine. Obviously you can't choose the 'house' wine (or the wrath of the Birthday Women would be boundless) - and anyway you acknowledge yourself that the cheapest wine on the menu would be rubbish (even at £16 a bottle!) - so you go for a more sophisticated-sounding Château something or other at 20 or 25 quid, and you just know with a sinking heart that you could have bought 5 decent bottles for the same money at the supermarket. (In Galicia last year I would eat cheap, wholesome and tasty food in bars where a palatable local wine was thrown in free.)

To add insult to injury, we were seated at a table so huge you could hardly hear what anyone was saying (yes, I know we could have moved) - a situation not helped by the noise from the saxophonist-cum-guitarist two-piece house band which decided to play a medley of schmaltzy jazz standards from a few feet away (yes, again, I know we could have moved, but I knew the guitarist and didn't want to offend him since he was at the time selling my old Korg M1 synthesizer for me).

I'd finally had enough of so-called French restaurants at some point during our final celebratory meal the next week. This time the tables were so small (or should I say bijou) and closely-packed that you were practically eating your next-door-diner's dinner. (Not that I would have minded over much as I'm one of those awkward people who always wish they'd ordered someone else's choice.) I went for the lamb tagine (at least this was vaguely French because of the North African connection) - but unfortunately it turned out to be just a sweet-savoury soggy mess on the plate. I couldn't help but compare it with the lamb tagine I make myself which - all modesty aside - is really good!

The message is clear and plain. Entertain people at home - at a fraction of the cost and with hugely increased pleasure, relaxation and taste sensation. No worries about drink-driving. No worries about tiny portions. And you know you'll get good coffee.

A Year Of Grace

My mother died on 3 November 2004 after suffering from progressive Alzheimer's disease for 5 years. The next day I found on her bookshelves an anthology of spiritual poetry and prose chosen by Victor Gollancz and called A Year Of Grace: Passages Chosen And Arranged To Express A Mood About God And Man. It was first published in 1950. It helped see me through that 1st week after her death.

The book contains quotations from a diverse range of writers: William Blake, Meister Eckhart, Sir Thomas Browne, Goethe, Shelley, Spinoza, Gabriel Marcel, Aldous Huxley, William James, Marcus Aurelius, Thomas Traherne, Erasmus, Jakob Boehme, Erich Fromm, Albert Schweitzer, Shelley, Plato and St John Of The Cross to name but a few; and quotations from such great spiritual resources as the Talmud, the Bible and the Bhavagad-Gita.

There are also several poems by Rainer Maria Rilke, one of my favourite poets. If you read about Rilke you realise very quickly that both his life and his intensely felt poetry are inextricably entwined. His Sonnets To Orpheus and Duino Elegies are profound and idiosyncratic works revealing a very personal and mystical relationship with God.

This poem comes from his more accessible collection The Book Of Hours. It shows an unconventionally symbiotic relationship between Rilke and his God. It is as if God needs us more than we need Him. It is as if God is still growing - and he needs us in order to continue to grow.

What will you do, God, when I die?
When I, your picher, broken, lie?
When I, your drink, go stale or dry?
I am your garb, the trade you ply,
you lose your meaning, losing me.

Homeless without me, you will be
robbed of your welcome, warm and sweet.
I am your sandals: your tired feet
will wander bare for want of me.

Your mighty cloak will fall away.
Your glance that on my cheek was laid
and pillowed warm, will seek, dismayed,
the comfort that I offered once -
to lie, as sunset colours fade
in the cold lap of alien stones.

What will you do, God? I am afraid.

Sic Transit Gloria Mundi

I think about death most days. In fact I've done so probably since my early teens, from the time I became joltingly aware of my own mortality. (Lately I was pleased to find some solidarity in this habit on reading Julian Barnes' recent book Nothing To Be Frightened Of.) However I suspect I'm not unique. Indeed I'm willing to bet I'm in the great majority. The spectre of death haunts pretty well every serious work of art ever composed. Its feared arrival is the conscious or unconscious spur to most of what we do.

But there's nothing to be too despondent about. I'm no morbid character. In fact I like to think I'm joyful and optimistic on the whole (with a big streak of melancholy, which is why I like all those soulful June Tabor songs). I'm generally positive about life. I can get very excited and enthusiastic about things (conversely, very dejected too when things go wrong - a hint of manic depression there?) You see, it's the acute consciousness of the impermanence of things that makes things so poignantly wonderful, so achingly bittersweet. It's the awful knowledge of certain, impending death and destruction that makes things so unbearably beautiful. Death is the very mainspring of human striving and artistic endeavour; and the indisputable fact of life's transience is the very fact which gives life its value.

They say that all stories and myths and novels are based on just a handful of eternal plots and themes. Likewise I'm sure that all true poems, paintings, photographs, plays - all works of art - are in essence only about two things.

Love.

And death.

Sic Transit Gloria Mundi.

Sparkle And Shine In Leicester

I believe that one fine day all the children of Abraham/Will lay down their swords forever in Jerusalem Jerusalem STEVE EARLE

To the Big Session Festival at De Montfort Hall, Leicester, yesterday to see Steve Earle and Allison Moorer. We arrived at 2 pm and spent a relaxing afternoon picnicking on the grass, drifting round the hippie stalls selling tie-dyed clothes, healing stones, little buddhas and Nag Champa incense sticks, and listening to bands.

After a mesmeric, ear-splitting set from Seth Lakeman (his brother Sam plays keyboards for and is married to Cara Dillon - it's a small world the folk world), Steve came on stage at 9.45 pm. He's always charismatic (I've seen him twice before) and he had the audience in the palm of his hand from the start. Earlier his new wife Allison Moorer, a great singer-songwriter herself, played her own set (ex-heroin addict, ex-jailbird Earle, "the hardcore troubadour", previously married 7 times and twice to the same woman, married Moorer in 2005). She joined Steve for a couple of songs during his own performance. They seemed besotted with each other! He sang a mixture of old and new - favourites like Galway Girl and Copperhead Road, and some new songs from his latest album Washington Square Serenade. The new love song Sparkle And Shine, sounding just like early Bob Dylan, blew me away.

If anyone doesn't know the amazing Steve Earle, there are plenty of YouTube videos. Here are just 3: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=_7-PM_4aeE4; http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=dc86_Weoye0; http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=As0XCEjFxpQ

Flummoxed By Dunnocks

Doom and gloom, I'm already getting withdrawal symptoms. Yes, BBC2's Springwatch has finished for another year. I'm not a big TV watcher, though I am partial to the odd comedy, film or nature programme. But Springwatch has me addicted. I'm not really sure why. Perhaps it's because it's live TV (live TV is always the best if only for the gaffes), perhaps it's the unlikely but riveting combination of the eccentric, unbelievably knowledgeable Bill Oddie and the vivacious, sexy Kate Humble, perhaps it's the comedy (both intentional and unintentional), perhaps it's the sweet but misguided humanizing of nature (yet what's wrong with a bit of anthropomorphism between friends anyway?), perhaps it's the comically desperate desire to create drama out of mundanity, perhaps it's the thrilling shots of rare beasts like the Scottish wild cat or the close-ups of bird chicks hatching. I don't know - but I suspect it's a combination of all of these that has me glued to the screen.

This year Bill and Kate were bunkered in Pensthorpe Nature Reserve, Norfolk, directly below a wren's nest; and the enthusiastic and talented wildlife cameraman Simon King kept popping up at different places in the Cairngorms. His shots of ospreys fishing taken by an ultra-slow motion camera were fantastic and opened up a whole new world. Another classic moment was when a family of fledging goldeneye ducklings literally hurled themselves out of their tree nesting box onto the ground. Also Oscar and Emmy, the delightful bobbing oystercatcher chicks, were terrific value. Fabulous. And in what other TV programme can you witness uncensored in-your-face mating (whether it's shagging stag beetles or ovipositing banded demoiselle dragonflies), infanticide (that rogue male swallow), straight murder (the weasel and the baby reed bunting) and cannibalism (the barn owls) - all within an hour?

Oh well, I suppose I'll have to quit the sofa, get out the house and go see some real wildlife in the real world. (Some slithy toves, borogroves or mome raths would be rather nice but I think they're a bit elusive round these parts.) However there's always Autumnwatch to look forward to...

PS Kate Humble coined in Thursday's final programme the wonderful phrase "flummoxed by dunnocks" which I've used as the title of this post.

Cara Dillon

Last weekend we went to the Southwell Folk Festival. It was very enjoyable and superbly well organised. Over the 3 days (6 - 8 June) we saw and heard some fine bands and artists, including the highly original harmony band Tanglefoot from Canada, traditional Irish band Last Night's Fun, Hilary James and Simon Mayor (one of the world's top mandolin players), Brooks Williams (a really remarkable American bluesy, finger-picking guitarist and singer), Rachel Unthank, Bellowhead - and the lovely, divine, incomparable Cara Dillon. Here are links to a couple of Cara's YouTube videos: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-oquRLcmAM; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MF8mxuOu5WE

Ted And Sylvia

For a poet to marry a poet it's a dangerous thing. But for a poetic genius to marry a poetic genius it's nothing short of disaster. But would we have Birthday Letters had Hughes married a tart-baking housewife and card-carrying member of the WI? And would we have Ariel had Plath married a kindly but boring young curate or carpet salesman? And does it matter anyway? It's only poetry, after all.

After Plath's suicide in 1963, Hughes' lover, Assia Wevill, also took her own life 6 years later. To lose one wife may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness. However he did achieve some kind of stability after marrying Carol Orchard in 1970.

Biographers tend to side prejudicially on one side or the other, pro-Hughes or pro-Plath. Myself, I prefer the more balanced approach favoured by Elaine Feinstein in her excellent biography Ted Hughes: The Life Of A Poet. But who, even Feinstein, knows the real truth of their relationship? It will remain a mystery, thank God - like all relationships.

Some time ago I took a walk in Hughes Country and just recently I dug out my account of it. Here it is.

Remains Of Elmet

The Calder Valley in the South Pennines forms part of the old Celtic kingdom of Elmet. It's the birthplace of Ted Hughes, and the place to which he returned constantly throughout his life. Read anything from his collection Remains Of Elmet and you are immediately transported to this land of sodden moorlands and ancient trackways, bubbling curlews and blackened gritstone; a harsh, brooding landscape littered with deserted cotton mills and abandoned hill farms.

Heptonstall hunkers down on the high buttress above Hebden Bridge. It was here I began my walk one cold and misty February morning. But not before exploring Heptonstall itself - an authentic example of a hand-weaving village from the pre-industrial era. Much like a mini-Haworth in fact, but without the tourists and the commercial tat. Terraced rows of houses, faced with blackened stone blocks, slope down to a churchyard wrapped in peaceful, Gothic gloom and paved with gravestones laid end-to-end like a mosaic. There are two churches almost side-by-side: the Victorian New Parish Church of St Thomas the Apostle, and the atmospheric ruin of the earlier Church of St Thomas a Becket - built around 1260, destroyed by storm in 1847 and condemned by the itinerant preacher John Wesley as 'the ugliest church I know'. However in its derelict state it's certainly a lot prettier than the octagonal Methodist Chapel (designed by Wesley in 1764) which lies marooned in the architectural warp and weft of numerous gritstone weavers' cottages. Before leaving I sought out the grave (second row in the new churchyard) of the neurasthenic poetic genius Sylvia Plath who committed suicide in 1963. The headstone, inscribed by her husband Ted Hughes, reads:

  Even Amidst Fierce Flames The Golden Lotus Can be Planted.

Pondering this quotation from the great allegorical Chinese folk novel Monkey, written in the sixteenth century by Wu Ch'Eng-en, and delighting in the wonderful strangeness of its setting amid the scores of conventional Christian epitaphs, I turned my back on the village and scampered down a steep rocky bridleway (the Calderdale Way) to a stone packhorse bridge spanning Hebden Water. On the eastern bank an entertaining riverside path followed a frothy, rust-coloured, dipper-haunted stream, which was enlivened by weirs now and then, and pacified by mill ponds. The next landmark was Gibson Mill. This was a cotton mill built by Abraham Gibson in 1800 which employed mainly women and children. Despite the installation of a steam engine, boiler and chimney in the 1860s, manufacturing ceased in the 1890s due to unreliable water flow and competition from much larger mills in the Calder Valley. After the mill, a short woodland stretch rose to Hardcastle Crags, a beauty spot popular with Victorian excursionists.

Emerging from the trees, a remote lane wound over a culvert where a beck tumbled down into Rowshaw Clough. Just before Walshaw Farm the call of birds suddenly filled the silence. Finches twittered and swooped, and a party of fieldfares flew off chacking madly, their grey rumps prominent. From the moorland above a solitary grouse croaked loudly. Close by the farm I made a right-angled turn up a muddy walled track and headed through tussocky intake fields towards the higher ground. I contoured round Shackleton Knoll alongside an enclosing stone wall until a gate led on to the moor itself. This was the high point of the walk in every sense. The sun was now out, illuminating high mooorland and intake pastures, and burning off the tendrils of mist which still lingered in the valley of Crimsworth Dean beyond. I rested a while on this soggy bump between the two valleys, and enjoyed the sun, the view, and the silvery gleam of Gorple Lower Reservoir to the west. There are many places higher, many places more remote, many places more obviously spiritual; but for me, today, this was a contemplative viewpoint of space and freedom.

And so I went down again into the Vale, as go down we must, and met the first walkers of the day who were struggling up the hill I now descended. The route back led through Crimsworth Dean and past a stand of tall Scots Pine trees which clung to the steep slopes above the beck. I remembered how Lord Savile had given this woodland to the National Trust in 1951; and how, a few years later, he and the local people had scuppered plans to flood this valley and turn it into a reservoir. Eventually, after taking a minor road by Spring Wood and then following a lovely riverine path strewn with moss-covered stumps and stones, I reached another packhorse bridge and the delighfully scruffy backstreets of Hebden Bridge. These were lined with factories and new developments - and also with tiny, terraced houses, dark inside, but on the outside hung with wind chimes and festooned with plant pots placed on old rescued treadle-driven spinning machines. This textile town has a claustrophobic, gritty charm: rough, unmodernised pubs, sixties-style signage, no McDonalds (thankfully) in sight. But the relentless economic decline over the years has been oddly reversed by a kind of latter-day New Age flowering. The shops are chock-full of candles, tarot decks and occult books; and artistically printed cards in newsagents' windows advertise courses in reiki, shiatsu and meditation.

Tearing myself away from this hippie settlement with its stone setts and its Little Theatre, from its shabby Rochdale Canal, where Ted Hughes used to net loach as a boy, and its grey wagtails bobbing on the now non-poisonous River Calder, I returned by bus up the steep hill to Heptonstall in the mid-afternoon sun, and looked down through the bus window at Hebden Bridge in the valley below. I saw rows and rows of terraced houses striating the hillside, home-factories (three, four, five-storied and many-windowed for maximum light) in which women used to turn wool into the yarn and cloth that was conveyed originally by packhorse, then later by canal boat, to the merchants in the piece halls of Halifax. At least I could see the place - a hundred years ago it would have been hidden by a vast, toxic pall of smoke generated by the cotton mills of the Industrial Revolution.

Five hours had passed and I was sitting once more on a wooden bench in Heptonstall's old churchyard and listening to the chattering jackdaws, thinking about literary and industrial heritage, and of what Ted Hughes had written about this very spot:

A great bird landed here.

Its song drew men out of rock,
Living men out of bog and heather.

Its song put a light in the valleys
And harness on the long moors.

Its song brought a crystal from space
And set it in men's heads.

Then the bird died.

Its giant bones
Blackened and became a mystery.

The crystal in men's heads
Blackened and fell to pieces.

The valleys went out.
The moorland broke loose.

Heptonstall Old Church from Remains Of Elmet by Ted Hughes.

Nude, Giant Girls

Pylons, those pillars/Bare like nude, giant girls that have no secret. From The Pylons by Stephen Spender.

It's probably a mistake to title my post thus. It may encourage the wrong kind of (go)ogling visitor. But, hell, I've made quite a few blogging errors lately - what matter one more?

Photo taken one and a half hours ago looking west from the village.

Birdwatching

Here's a poem I wrote a while back after an afternoon's bird watching at Titchwell Marsh RSPB Reserve on the North Norfolk Coast. (If anyone doesn't know the North Norfolk Coast, I really recommend a visit. Its stark and subtle beauty will haunt you for ever thereafter. When young we had family holidays at Cromer and Sheringham - so I've got potent childhood memories of it too.)

I suppose this poem's more about a certain type of upper-class or upper-middle-class bird watcher than the Norfolk location or the birds themselves. I remember I was in a peculiarly twisted mood - probably quite a good state to be in for writing poetry. I stopped at a pub on the way home and wrote this very quickly in an intense, concentrated burst of energy at the pub table. I was completely oblivious to everything else going on around me. Sometimes a poem can take minutes to write; other times it can remain incomplete for years. Paul Valéry said that poems were never finished - only abandoned.

It's an unusual poetic form for me (silly limericks aside) - being in rhymed 4 line stanzas - but I think it suits the subject. Hopefully the poem sets the scene, then cynically widens out into more of a universal comment on class history, competition, predation and blood sports - and perhaps other things too. (Wow!) At least, that was the intention...

Birdwatching

A serious game, this, with its coded rules.
As wolves hunt in packs and sharks in schools,
So birders gather in high-precision groups,
Kitted in Barbours and old army boots,

Hunched on windswept headlands, bitter coasts,
Spiky with tripods and telescopes,
Displaying their far-seeing tubes and pods,
Like high-tech altarware, to sea-born gods.

Strong-jawed, posh-speaking, ex-Sandhurst types,
Purposefully striding up the dykes,
Boardroom bullies, private healthcare shrinks,
Anglican clergy, purple-veined with drink,

Pounce on a flick of rump, a mid-air jink,
Quicksilver flourish. 'Buggering Christ! I think,
A flock of golden plover! Focus quick!'
A rush of wingbeats, then soft raining shit...

They vanish in a gold and silver flash
Over the marsh. Our twitchers make a dash
In Goretex gear and guano-spattered hats,
Raking brackish lagoons and fenland flats.

These confident, loud-voiced, long-vowelled toffs
Parade their arcane lore of reeves and ruffs,
Bitterns and bearded tits, ever compete
To classify what flies and has two feet.

The peregrine claims as right the pigeon's breath -
Link in the chain, cycle of life and death,
Dog eating dog. A necessary part
Of nature. No premeditated art.

Our human predators, safe in snug cars,
Drive back to manses, mansions, stag-hung bars.
Once armed with guns to shoot the common p(h)easant,
Now name not maim - just marginally more pleasant.

Altered Quotations

Every blogger or bloggette goes through a blogentity crisis from time to time. Does my blog have anything to do with the real world? What is the real world anyway? How much of the self that is revealed in my blog my real self or a persona? What is my real self? I doubt if there are any real answers to these real questions. Or virtually none.

Why do we blog? A need for self expression? To be noticed by others? To freeze moments of our life, as in a diary - giving the illusion of something permanent? To play intellectual games? To record for posterity? To fill in the time if we have time on our hands? To create something we would like to consider akin to art? To impart factual information? It's a strange business, isn't it?

Blogging, like life, like the Camino, is an endless journey, a journey of flux, change and constant renewal. I am taking a short time out from the blogworld. But I shall be back at some point to continue my journey. Many thanks to all my loyal readers without whom this blog would be only half complete. And watch this space.

I leave you for the moment with some Altered Quotations. The proper words are listed in their correct sequence at the end.

To blog or not to blog - that is the question. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.

It is solved by blogging. ST AUGUSTINE.

Blogging is a pathless land. KRISHNAMURTI.

A blog can only be understood backwards, but it must be written forwards. SOREN KIERKEGAARD.

You may drive out a blog with a pitchfork, yet she will always hurry back. HORACE.

Blogging consists in sharing the hallucinations of our fellow bloggers. EVELYN UNDERHILL.

Those who refuse to reread are doomed to read the same blog everywhere. ROLAND BARTHES.

Any lived minute is immensely more than its most subtle blog evocation. JEREMY HOOKER.

No matter. Blog again. Fail again. Fail better. SAMUEL BECKETT.

A blog should seem to offer itself to the reader's completion, not to the writer's. JAMES WOOD.

We exist not in ourselves, but in terms of each other's blogs. E. M. FORSTER.

Blogging is the last refuge of the scoundrel. SAMUEL JOHNSON.

A blog ought to be a festival of the intellect, that is, a game, but a solemn, ordered and significant game. PAUL VALÉRY.

A blog is never finished; it is only abandoned. PAUL VALÉRY.

Read blogs are sweet, but those unread /Are sweeter... JOHN KEATS.

[Blogs are] imaginary gardens with real toads in them. MARIANNE MOORE.

Now a blog lives as long as it is unfathomed. Once it is fathomed... once it is known and its meaning is fixed or established, it is dead. D. H. LAWRENCE.

Blogging is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity. GUSTAVE FLAUBERT.

be, be, walking, truth, life, lived, nature, sanity, neighbours, text, verbal, try, fiction, minds, patriotism, poem, poem, heard melodies, unheard, poems, book, language

Hello You, Hello Universe

Many have written long literary and mystical texts on mankind's problematic rapport with the natural world, and how we all have the potential ability to be in harmony with the near and far universe if only we knew how to grasp it. (Jonathan Bate has written, from a writerly, metaphorical standpoint, a wonderful book about this called The Song of the Earth. I too have touched on it from time to time, for instance here.)

Many also have written even longer psychological, anthropological and sociological studies on identity and our individual relationship with ourselves and with others. Indeed, parts of the blogworld have been riffing round this theme recently.

But Emily Dickinson manages somehow to condense all of the above, with breathtaking clarity and a little touch of ambiguity (the word ourselves), in this remarkable short poem. And in just 16 words. Magic.

We introduce ourselves

To Planets and to Flowers

But with ourselves

Have etiquettes

Embarrassments

And awes

Remembrance Of Things Past

In a comment on my Proustian (aha, another adjectivized author!) post, John Hee has reminded me of the hilarious Monty Python sketch - the All-England Summarize Proust Competition (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8rhIw_9ucA). I remember us all crowding into the university common room to watch Monty Python religiously once a week; it was like some sacred rite. This must have been in the early 1970s. It was the only TV programme I ever watched in those days. None of the students seemed to watch TV very often. There were more profitable things to do - like playing shove ha'penny in the Half Moon Pub or putting traffic cones on the college roof.

Mad, Bad And Dangerous

I have no consistency except in politics; and that probably arises from my indifference to the subject altogether. LORD BYRON

The great art of life is sensation, to feel that we exist, even in pain. LORD BYRON

A writer certainly secures an emblematic and lasting place in literary history if his or her name becomes adjectivized and is then widely used adjectivally in common parlance. There's Joycean, Dickensian, Shakespearian. There's Kafkaesque of course. And then there's Byronic. We all know what this means in an instant - romantic, heroic, swashbuckling, sensual, greedy for experience, yearning for travel and distant lands, poetic, sensitive, sexually turbocharged, desirous of women (and perhaps men too), extravagant, generous... Can such a man of action, yet a man also endowed with both good looks and a good vocabulary, actually exist?

In early 19th century Europe and America many women seemed to think so. His name was Lord George Gordon Byron (1788-1824). Newstead Abbey, which we visited yesterday, was his ancestral home. It's little more than half an hour's drive from here, but I hadn't been there since a school trip 40 years ago. We really enjoyed meandering through both house and gardens in the warm sunshine - the latter were very beautiful, especially the Japanese Garden with its stone sculptures, hostas and yellow azaleas (1st pic). Ducks and peacocks fussed round us as we ate our picnic on a bench in a quiet corner.

Until Byron's friend Thomas Wildman invested some of his money in the place in 1817, and attempted to restore it, at least partially, to its former glory, Newstead was gradually sliding into ruin. Byron (2nd pic) lived mainly elsewhere (on Burgage Green in Southwell just down the road from here) as the place was uninhabitable. When he did live there, his life was far from conventional. There are accounts of dogs running wild (one dog was a huge beast described by some as half wolf) and also of a bear roaming at large. The Great Hall was used for fencing, boxing and wrestling bouts. It's faithfully recorded that his female servants were chosen for the comeliness of their physical attributes; and his female guests, many of whom were some of Nottinghamshire's most attractive and desirable women, were most times easily persuaded to stay the night (3rd and 4th pics).

Eventually Byron was forced to leave England under a cloud of scandal. There were tales of numerous love affairs, mounting debts, orgies and wild living; and rumours of marital violence, incest (with his half-sister Augusta Leigh) and sodomy. How exaggerated these stories were is open to conjecture - certainly Lady Caroline Lamb (5th pic), acting as jilted and jealous lover, had a vested interest in aiding and abetting the rumour mill. Her description of Byron as mad, bad, and dangerous to know has famously gone down in history.

He never returned to England again, journeying to Geneva and Venice and Genoa (with more liaisons along the way including one with Mary Shelley's stepsister Claire Clairmont and one with the Italian Countess Guiccioli) until he reached Greece where he ended up fighting on the side of the Greeks against the occupying Ottomans. He died in Messolonghi of a fever at the age of 36 after having planned an attack on the Turks at Lepanto. Byron is a national hero in Greece to this day.

How Proust Can Change Your Life

How Proust Can Change Your Life is the title of a book by Alain de Botton. I would very much like to read it. It's an accessible study of Proust's great, influential and unique novel Remembrance Of Things Past (or, depending on which translation you prefer, In Search Of Lost Time). De Botton uses Proust's book to demonstrate the power and relevance of literature - a great book is capable, quite literally, of completely transforming your life. (John Hee has described this kind of event, on a more modest scale, in his recent post.) I believe in this magical power too. It has happened to me, though usually less dramatically, on many occasions. (I've just finished reading another book by De Botton, The Consolations of Philosophy, which I enjoyed enormously. But more of that book later.)

I began reading C. K. Scott-Moncrieff's translation of Proust's 7 volume novel in my early 20s, but never got beyond the 1st volume, Swann's Way. Now I feel the urge to start it afresh - this time probably in the much newer translation by Christopher Prendergast and others which Allen Lane published in 2002.

My thoughts turned to Proust today because this afternoon we went for a stroll in Whisby Nature Park where, though not much was going on in the bird domain (the chiffchaffs were chiff-chaffing and the willow warblers willow-warbling but the nightingales and sand martins we hoped to see were out of sight on their nests), the hawthorn blossom in the hedgerows was at its creamy, radiant best.

Just as Swann is famously transported back in time by the taste of a madeleine cake, the sight and smell of hawthorn blossom also acts for him both as memory trigger and peak experience. Somewhere in the middle of Swann's Way Proust writes how Swann became enraptured by hawthorn flowers (which he later describes as having the bitter-sweet fragrance of almonds):

As we were liable, there, to meet M. Vinteuil, who held very strict views on 'the deplorable untidiness of young people, which seems to be encouraged in these days,' my mother would first see that there was nothing out of order in my appearance, and then we would set out for the church. It was in these 'Month of Mary' services that I can remember having first fallen in love with hawthorn blossom. The hawthorn was not merely in the church, for there, holy ground as it was, we had all of us a right of entry; but, arranged upon the altar itself, inseparable from the mysteries in whose celebration it was playing a part, it thrust in among the tapers and the sacred vessels its rows of branches, tied to one another horizontally in a stiff, festal scheme of decoration; and they were made more lovely still by the scalloped outline of the dark leaves, over which were scattered in profusion, as over a bridal train, little clusters of buds of a dazzling whiteness. Though I dared not look at them save through my fingers, I could feel that the formal scheme was composed of living things, and that it was Nature herself who, by trimming the shape of the foliage, and by adding the crowning ornament of those snowy buds, had made the decorations worthy of what was at once a public rejoicing and a solemn mystery. Higher up on the altar, a flower had opened here and there with a careless grace, holding so unconcernedly, like a final, almost vaporous bedizening, its bunch of stamens, slender as gossamer, which clouded the flower itself in a white mist, that in following these with my eyes, in trying to imitate, somewhere inside myself, the action of their blossoming, I imagined it as a swift and thoughtless movement of the head with an enticing glance from her contracted pupils, by a young girl in white, careless and alive.

After this passage follow several pages which focus on a hawthorn hedge outside the church even more intently. In detailed, observant, intensely poetic meditations such as these, Proust is showing us the intimate, subjective relationship between the outer world of nature, family and society and the inner world of mind, memory and imagination.

Ambushed By Beauty

My mother-in-law was staying with us all last week and on Saturday we drove her back to her home in the Lake District. We followed the A1 up to Scotch Corner, turned west along the A66 as far as Brough, then took the A685 to Tebay and Kendal. From Scotch Corner onwards this is a fine route with great views of the Pennines. We picnicked in the Howgills on open grassland close to the village of Newbiggin-on-Lune.

After arriving mid-afternoon at her little rented cottage in Kendal, I perused her bookshelves and suddenly recalled that it was here I'd seen the phrase "ambushed by beauty" which, as some bloggers know, I've been trying to trace. I soon found the poetic source - in Moya Cannon's book of poems The Parchment Boat (1997) published in Ireland by The Gallery Press of County Meath.

My mother-in-law had met the author, heard her read, and bought a signed copy of her book at the Sligo Yeats Festival in 2003. I flipped the pages and soon came to the poem Mountain. As you can see, I'd misremembered slightly:

Mountain

Beauty can ambush us, even through a car window.

This green galleon sails eternally through Sligo,

dragging our hearts in its wake.

One singer was found by hunters on these green flanks

and another chose them as a deep cradle for his bones

but neither the Fianna's chroniclers nor Yeats

did more than pay their respects

to what was already here -

a mountain

which had already

shaken off glaciers,

carried a human cargo,

known grace in stone.

It might have been the same February light

on these tender slopes

which drew the first people from the coast

to set their fires on this plateau,

to build on this great limestone boat

whose boards are made of fishbones,

whose water is green time.

Moya had explained during her reading that she'd suddenly had a dramatic view from her car of Ben Bulben, the flat-topped limestone and shale mountain that overlooks Sligo town on Ireland's west coast, and this unforeseen satori moment had been the seed from which the poem grew.

The ghost of William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) haunts this whole area. One of his poems is actually titled Under Ben Bulben; and Yeats himself lies buried in Drumcliff Churchyard near the mountain's foot. His tombstone famously reads: Cast a cold Eye/On Life, on Death/Horseman pass by!

There's a big and fascinating theme waiting to be explored on 'sacred' mountains like Ben Bulben, mountains with literary, mythological and spiritual associations - such as Mt Rainier in Washington State's Cascade Range, Canigou in the French Pyrenees and Cadair Idris in Snowdonia, North Wales. I've touched briefly on this theme once before.

The Fianna were warrior bands in Irish mythology found in the stories of the Fenian Cycle.