Poetry And Walking

When my sister and only sibling, Elizabeth, died from a brain tumour at the age of 29 in August 1987, I found myself turning to poetry for succour, consolation and a deeper view of things. I called on Keats, Coleridge, Wordsworth and other English Romantic poets; I visited Lorca, Levertov and RS Thomas. I also began walking more and more, and further and further. In the simple act of walking, in the natural human activity of placing one foot in front of the other, I encountered a kind of fragile peace; and the sublime scenery I often walked through seemed to provide, at least partly, a benign and numinous response to my unanswerable questions.

I kept a written log of my walking routes from April 1987 to May 2006. Looking at it again recently, I'm reminded that a few weeks after my sister's death Carmen and I stayed for a while in Porthmadog (Wales), where I climbed the little hill of Moel-y-Gest and the mountain of Cnicht, and ascended the Roman Steps from Cwm Bychan. The landscape here in Snowdonia is wild, dramatic and breathtakingly beautiful.

My mother, Joan, died in November 2004, and again I turned to poetry: this time to the poems she'd  transferred to her commonplace books in a painstaking and neat hand, or cut out from magazines with scissors and pasted into her scrapbooks; and also those chosen by WB Yeats for The Oxford Book Of Modern Verse 1892-1935. Mum had been awarded this book as a prize for 'General Proficiency' at the end of her 1937-8 year at The Municipal High School for Girls in Doncaster, Yorkshire.

Three years later I completed my first Camino, and lit candles in memory of my sister and mum at various significant stages along the Way. Here's the wonderfully crazy signpost at Manjarin in the Spanish Montes de León:

My father, Fred, died in January 2009, and almost exactly one year later I walked the Vía de la Plata. I dedicated this Camino to him. We did not have an easy relationship, but all is now more peaceable. The last words he spoke to me were: 'You know I love you, Robert'.

Dad did not appreciate the finer subtleties of poetry as such, but he did love the words to the Wesleyan hymns he played on the organ each week at the Methodist village chapel. Only the other day I was leafing through his Methodist Hymn Book and alighted on John Bunyan's Who Would True Valour See (from Pilgrim's Progress):

Who would true Valour see
Let him come hither;
One here will Constant be,
Come Wind, come Weather.
There's no Discouragement,
Shall make him once Relent,
His first avow'd Intent,
To be a Pilgrim.

(The Monk's Gate arrangement by Vaughan Williams, adapted from a traditional English melody.)

Needless to say, he also loved the words of the Bible, and of course the words of the Authorised King James Version are poetry indeed. This is the title page of one of his Bibles:

Poetry and walking have been my salvation in the most challenging of times. There are times when I feel they have actually saved my life, or kept me sane at the very least.

Sorrow

Why does the thin grey strand
Floating up from the forgotten
Cigarette between my fingers,
Why does it trouble me?

Ah, you will understand;
When I carried my mother downstairs,
A few times only, at the beginning
Of her soft-foot malady,

I should find, for a reprimand
To my gaiety, a few long grey hairs
On the breast of my coat; and one by one
I let them float up the dark chimney.

DH LAWRENCE

(Collected by WB Yeats in The Oxford Book Of Modern Verse 1892-1935.)

Building Life

It’s a good life, the builder’s life:
Out in all weathers,
Digging, laying, pointing, praying
The rain holds off another day.

Give me the simple building life:
Excavating buried guilts and fears,
Shoveling them on the skip
Like so much rubble;

Shoring up with hardcore
Shaky beliefs and promises;
Lining up neatly
Scattered cobblestone memories;

Filling up the cracks
Of the mind with silver sand;
Cementing, like a jigsaw of pavers,
The pieces of a ravaged heart;

Patiently, expertly bonding
Random, discoloured bricks
Of love and joy, hope and desire,
Till I am safe and whole and new.

For Susan

Think of what our Nation stands for,
Books from Boots' and country lanes,
Free speech, free passes, class distinction,
Democracy and proper drains ...

JOHN BETJEMAN In Westminster Abbey

Easter Quiz Answers

It's time for the solution to the Easter Fun And Frolics quiz. No one had the correct answer, but Danish Dog came nearest with two right. The false facts were: (6) I have a phobic fear of beetroot (actually I love the stuff!), (14) My middle name is Archibald (it's John) and (16) I renamed myself Robert after a sex change operation (!)

Just a few words about some of the other statements.

I used to work in publishing — which is the reason I met those well-known personalities.

My association with the Georgian State Dance Company was short and sweet. I was picked out as a stooge by a couple of the dancers (I was sitting end of row in the audience), and before I knew what was happening found myself on stage doing some Cossack-style dancing much to the amusement of the whole theatre and the acute embarrassment of my children.

You really don't want to know about (8), (9), (10), (15) and (17), I assure you. Please put them down to youthful excess, not to any ingrained character defect.

And as for the alligator — my wife approached one in the Florida Everglades, mistakenly believing it was a life-size plastic model (similar to the one we'd just seen at the start of the boardwalk). When it moved, her screams could be heard all the way from Flamingo to Miami.

(All images from Wikimedia Commons)

Escape

I fled the mayhem, seeking a little peace and quiet for a while. Sauntering through the village, I passed this wooden hut and veil of blossom ...

The gaunt trunk and naked branches of a crazily-angled tree etched themselves against a beautiful, pale-blue sky ... 

Along the track to the river more trees danced and waved, silhouetted against a rich cloudscape ...

The spring had really advanced since I was last here. Snowy white banks of blackthorn lined the lane, and the hawthorn's leaves had unfolded, so soft to the touch ...

 

Digging

Having finished renovating inside the house (it's only taken fifteen years!), it was time to tackle the outside. This fine-weather springtime gave us the opportunity. The ill-sited and out-of-control Corsican pine tree had already gone. Now it was time to bid farewell to the ugly old concrete path and patio ... 

Dan, Tony, Jimmy and a nifty Bobcat digger. 

Tony has a few words with the skip hire man and his daughter.

Jesus Christ! They've dug a pit in front of our back door!

Dan awaits the next bucketful of stone hardcore.

Brief Candle

The flame is out, but scent and smoke remain.

Is absence presence by another name?

Questions

Why oh why oh why oh why oh

Why do mathematicians go mad?
As if in problem solving they dissolve
Themselves at the same time.

Why did Van Gogh shoot himself?
And his ear — what was that all about?
Was the balance of his mind
Deranged by syphilis, poisoned by lead?

Why do I wish to be like others
When I can never be like them,
Nor would I really want to be —
As talented as they are?

I’ll always be somewhere
On the borderland of happy-sad,
Always be somewhere
Safe in the boring middle like most of us.

Why am I forgetting more and more
And also remembering more and more,
And why does meeting strife
Make me turn on my heels and run these days?

And why am I disease, distraction,
Jealousy, anger, guilt, betrayal,
Elation and negation,
Perfection and putrefaction?

And why on earth should there be
On this table a vase, a bowl of fruit,
A book by Nietzsche,
A paper knife, a pen,

An Egyptian ankh, a crucible,
A bodhisattva, calm, inscrutable,
A dead fly in a glass, a wilting rose,
A poem so anarchic and so questioning?

(This could be a little-known poem by the little-known Austrian surrealist painter and poet Zelig Biberkopf, who died in an Innsbruck psychiatric hospital on 1st April 1976. Translated from the German by The Solitary Walker.)

Deep Blue

You may beat me at chess
But can you write a poem?


Can you stare into the sun’s eye


Until you see cantaloupe?
Or rock the sailboat of the moon
Adrift in a diamond sea of stars?






I think I hear you say
(Binarily in bits and bytes)
That it is so passé,


So bloody nineteenth century,


So Keatsian to scatter fruit and jewels


Like cosmic litter from a lichened


Cornucopia of clichés,


Romantic and redundant metaphors.






Agreed, my artificial friend.


But it is harder than you think
(If indeed you do think) to compose


The way things are
And the ideas within them
And what you feel


In words direct as sunlight,


Subtle as moonbeams
And real as seeds and stones.


You will always win at chess, my friend.
And today I will write a different kind of poem,
Deeper than the deepest blue you will ever know.

(Deep Blue was the chess-playing computer which beat world chess champion Garry Kasparov in a match in 1997.)

Easter Fun And Frolics

Recalling the other day my odd-one-out quiz from November 2009, I'm inspired to set another one — all in the spirit of holiday fun! I do hope you will participate. All you have to do is read these twenty-one facts about my life and decide which three (and only three) are false. The other eighteen are absolutely true, I assure you. It's easy! Isn't it?

1. I once had lunch with Cilla Black.

The Georgian State Dance Company

2. I have seen Bob Dylan more than thirty times.

3. I once danced with the Georgian State Dance Company on the stage of Northampton's Derngate Theatre to the great embarrassment of my children, who almost crawled under their seats.

4. Once when out walking the Cornish coastal path, I passed Jenny Agutter coming in the opposite direction.

5. I once stood within six feet of Lauren Bacall.

6. I have a phobic fear of beetroot — I can barely look at the stuff, let alone touch or eat it.

7. Jason Donovan once posed for a photograph in front of my wife — but she was so nervous she couldn't get the camera to work.

The flimsiest of nightclothes

8. I once woke up on a street bench in Frankfurt under the disapproving gaze of German bankers on their way to work.

9. On another occasion, I woke up in a hotel bed in Pau and found two strangers lying next to me in the flimsiest of nightclothes — a German banker and his wife, as it happens.

10. In a fit of sexual jealousy I once smashed the window of a Parisian chambre de bonne with my bare fists.

11. Once upon a time my hair extended down beyond my shoulders, and I was so thin I could almost touch my backbone with my stomach.

12. I once drank wine with George Melly, Maureen Lipman and Anne Diamond in the same room.

13. I was once asked by Kenneth Williams why I wore a beard (I had a beard in my twenties) as it made me look so much older. He then confided that he fancied a good-looking Gibraltarian colleague of mine (clean-shaven, of course).

14. My middle name is Archibald.

A glass of urine

15. I once drank a pint of urine in the mistaken belief that it was water.

16. My birth name is Roberta, but I renamed myself Robert after a sex change operation in 1982.

17. In a posh restaurant in Rome I once stubbed out a cigarette in a bowl of freshly prepared tagliatelle alla panna to an audience of utterly bemused and rightly insulted Italian waiters.

18. In one of Manchester's top Chinese restaurants I once bit into a dim sum rather too eagerly. Its contents arced gracefully over the table, and came to rest all over the shirt and tie of my sales director host sitting opposite.

An American alligator

19. My wife's first cousin is the famous comedian and TV personality Rowland Rivron.

20. My sister-in-law's ex-boyfriend built Paul McCartney's house in Kent.

21. My wife was once nearly eaten by an alligator in Florida's Everglades National Park.

Here's wishing everyone a Happy Easter!