Wednesday 18 April 2012

Time Traveller




Through telescopes

I view
the past.

And what
are my eyes
but telescopes?

To see
the future?

This needs more




Thursday 12 April 2012

Here for the ride


A
swirl
of smoke
of billions of years
and now
here we are
here in this very moment
third carriage from the engine
conscious and aware
in vast space and time
travellers on board
the trans-universal express
the invisible driver
no longer at the controls
and the crew
and ourselves
here for the ride
for the views
through the windows
here for the long journey
hit the emergency stop
nothing will happen
there is no jumping off
at the next station
we are all on board to the end
of the line
the final terminus
(a place that may never be built)
whatever we think
I
refill my glass
in the restaurant car
relax with my drink
and
unwind
and
unwind



Some years ago the above 'psychic painting' showing my 'true universal home' was mailed to me by an artist working on the other side of the world. I was humbled to receive it and I have to say, it is a continual source of hope and inspiration.

Thank you B.

Northern Hemisphere could be at risk from looming Fukushima catastrophe


1 - Do you know that there is a 98% chance of a 7.0+ earthquake at Fukushima Daiichi in the next 3 years?

2- Do you know what could happen if the tower known as Fukushima 4 collapsed?

3- Do you know what could happen if the fuel pool containing the 6,000 spent fuel rods was punctured?


Radio Ecoshock interview with nuclear expert Arnie Gundersen is now at Fairewinds. It's a must listen! It needs 26 minutes of your time. It's the grim truth you won't hear on your mainstream news.



High Summer 1917 Flanders




Reviewing a copy of the newly published posthumous collection Who Travels down this Narrow Road by Henry Pluckrose (1931 - 2011) Matador ISBN 978-1-78088-076-1 for David Pike at Pulsar (see LINKS) I was greatly impressed by the anti-war poem Simply Poppies.

I hope that the late Henry Pluckrose and the folks at Matador will not be too disturbed if I quote briefly here from the poem Simply Poppies which impressed me so much.

. . .

Dreamers from many lands died here
All fought, they thought, to save
A way of life, their Nation's rights.

King, Czar, Kaiser, those who ruled,
Explained at length why young men must die
To satisfy a war machine

. . .

Tuesday 10 April 2012

haikushima 9


when today the artist paints

the scene with words he dips

the brush in fukushima blue


The Cost


For the people of Japan's evacuation zone

Cherry Blossom Time


The air is bright with birdsong

and a million cherry trees in flower

- it's where no human beings can go


No children's fingers there to bleed

no workers there to lie at rest in shade

or drink the water from the spring


Birds can't pick the low twigs clean

the fruit will fall to stain the ground

- the skin will rot


And leave the stones

exposed below the trees

in rings


Where moles will build

more heaps of dirt and grey

cats catch their prey


gw2012

LATEST: According to one Japanese source there are plans to seal part of the affected area with an 88 km (54.68 miles) wall made from steel and painted over. The colour blue has been mentioned as a possibility. If that's the case, I'd like to suggest the sea-and-sky-blue patch design still visible in the radioactive ruins as an appropriate pattern for the wall.

A legendary 1,000 year old cherry tree growing near Fukushima used to attract 300,000 visitors whenever it flowered. Like many other attractions it is unfortunately now out of bounds. The tree shown in the above photograph is in Vienna, Austria.

3 poems from D H Lawrence


PEACE

Peace is written on the doorstep
In lava.

Peace, black peace congealed.
My heart will know no peace
Till the hill bursts.

Brilliant, intolerable lava,
Brilliant as a powerful burning-glass,
Walking like a royal snake down the mountain towards the sea.

Forests, cities, bridges
Gone again in the bright trail of lava.
Naxos thousands of feet below the olive-roots,
And now the olive leaves thousands of feet below the lava fire.

Peace congealed in black lava on the doorstep.
Within, white-hot lava, never at peace
Till it burst forth blinding, withering the earth;
To set again into rock,
Grey-black rock.

Call it Peace?


from GRAPES

Once God was all negroid, as now he is fair.
But it's so long ago, the ancient Bushman has forgotten more utterly than we, who have never known.

For we are on the brink of re-memberance.
Which, I suppose is why America has gone dry.
Our pale day is sinking into twilight,
And if we sip the wine, we find dreams coming upon us
Out of the imminent night.
Nay, we find ourselves crossing the fern-scented frontiers
Of the world before the floods, where man was dark and evasive
And the tiny vine-flower rose of all roses, perfumed,
And all in naked communion communicating as now our clothed vision can never communicate.
Vistas, down dark avenues,
As we sip the wine.
The grape is swart, the avenues dusky and tendrilled, subtly prehensile,
But we, as we start awake, clutch at our vistas democratic, boulevards, tram-cars, policemen.
Give us our own back,
Let us go to the soda-fountain, to get sober.


RUINATION

The sun is bleeding its fires upon the mist
That huddles in grey heaps coiling and holding back.
Like cliffs abutting in shadow of a dead grey sea
Some street-ends thrust forward their stack.

On the misty waste lands, away from the flushing grey
Of the morning, the elms are loftily dimmed, and tall
As if moving in air towards us, tall angels
Of darkness advancing steadily over us all.

D H Lawrence (1885 - 1930)


Monday 9 April 2012

3 poems from C P Cavafy


CRAFTSMAN OF WINE BOWLS

On this wine bowl - pure silver
made for the house of Herakleidis,
where good taste is the rule -
notice these graceful flowers, the streams, the thyme.
In the centre I put this beautiful young man,
naked, erotic, one leg still dangling
in the water. O memory, I begged
for you to help me most in making
the young face I loved appear the way it was.
This proved very difficult because
some fifteen years have gone by since the day
he died as a soldier in the defeat at Magnesia.


ON BOARD SHIP

It's like him, of course,
this little pencil portrait.

Hurriedly sketched, on the ship's deck,
the afternoon magical,
the Ionian Sea around us.

It's like him. But I remember him as better looking.
He was almost pathologically sensitive,
and this highlighted his expression.
He appears to me better looking
now that my soul brings him back, out of Time.

Out of Time. All these things are from very long ago -
the sketch, and the ship, and the afternoon.


IN ALEXANDRIA, 31 B.C.

From his village near the outskirts of town,
still dust-covered from the journey in,
the peddler arrives. And "Incense!" "Gum!"
"The best olive oil!" "Perfume for your hair!"
he hawks through the streets. But with all the hubbub,
the music, the parades, who can hear him?
The crowd shoves him, drags him along, knocks him around.
And when he asks, now totally confused, "What the hell's going on here?"
someone tosses him the huge palace lie:
that Antony is winning in Greece.

C P Cavafy (1863 - 1933)


Sunday 8 April 2012

Who me?



George Szirtes, always one for a good idea, has an interesting post on his blog under the title: Being photographed . . . (see: blog updates).

Why do we keep the photos we keep and discard the ones we discard is what he wants us to think about, and being George Szirtes much more besides.

Do we keep the best of them merely to boost the ego? Do we get rid of the worst because they make us look worse than we really think we should look?

I must admit I'd never thought of this topic as a blog subject; but having now considered it I see that it does interest me.

As far as I am aware I have in the course of time habitually deleted or thrown away the out of focus, the boring and uninteresting, and the images where the light was too dim or was overwhelmingly bright etc.; in other words the technically bad compositions.

Unlike George Szirtes I have never had the idea that my nose chin and neck wouldn't pass a Hollywood screen test. In my case its my ears, George!

A child once remarked to her teacher: Mr Williams has the biggest ears I have ever seen!

But nevertheless I have never consciously worried about how my ears appear on a photograph - not since junior school watch-the-birdie days at any rate!

Below are 3 photos of me, all selected completely at random - I come complete with 3 noses and 5 ears!

I like 'A' the best. There I see something of my brother.


A

B

C

When all is said and done it's not the size of our ears but it's what we have working between our ears that matters. And that is something one can't easily photograph.

No Grass in Israel?



Günther Grass, the controversial German writer recently published a poem on the subject of an upcoming Iran v. Israel nuclear showdown. See my earlier post 'Grass' - three posts below.

Grass has been declared a persona non grata by the Israeli interior minister. How long before they ban his books?

I am not a particular fan of Günther Grass's writing. I don't consider him to be in the same league as German writers W G Sebald, Thomas Mann or Thomas Bernhard for example.

I can honestly say that I found Grass's world famous Tin Drum to be repetitive and boring in the extreme. But that is not the point. That's merely a matter of my own personal taste in literature. The point is that the Israeli administration has shown that there is no place for art, in particular poetry, which does not match the official Israeli line.

The Nazis, you may recall, had a similar policy when it came to the arts.

I believe it was Winston Churchill who said:

I may not agree with what you say but I defend your right to say it.





An Apocalypse - 168 HIROSHIMA BOMBS

So you still think nuclear energy is safe ???


Members of Austria's GLOBAL 2000 are shortly to present details of the evidence they have gathered concerning the explosions at Fukushima one year ago. They will show for instance that there was released into the atmosphere 168 times more radiation than from the Hiroshima bomb . . .

The story continues in Vienna, Austria on 16th April.


Friday 6 April 2012

Easter holiday book tip

Walking near the Irish, Welsh, or British sea

Here's a 5-star book tip for your Easter holidays. It will shake you to the core. You will never be the same person again.

It's all about one man's walk along the edge of the sea. The sea is the German Ocean. Or in Suffolk it would be the North Sea. The man is a German and he lives in England. You'd think he'd know. But he doesn't. Or even if he does he doesn't. And neither do I. To me it's all one ocean. Or one sea. Whichever you prefer.

In the Rings of Saturn the tidal effect is at work. It's a hypnotic thing. What debris shall we find on the beach today?

It begins: "In August 1992, when the dog days were dawing to an end, I set off to walk the county of Suffolk, in the hope of dispelling the emptiness that takes hold of me whenever I have completed a long stint of work."

It consists of ten haunting chapters (nearly 300 pages) and many blurred photographs.

My recently purchased paperback copy was published by Vintage Books (8.99p) and it is the excellent English translation by Michael Hulse. The original Die Ringe des Saturn was published in German by Eichborn Verlag, Frankfurt am Main in 1995.

Now try what follows for size. I almost typed Sizewell. But that's another chapter.


"A second snap shows the severed head with a cigarette between lips still parted in a last cry of pain. This happened at Jasenovac camp on the Sava. Seven hundred thousand men, women and children were killed there alone in ways that made even the hair of the Reich's experts stand on end, as some of them are said to have admitted when they were amongst themselves. The preferred instruments of execution were saws and sabers, axes and hammers, and leather cuff-bands with fixed blades that were fastened on the lower arm and made specially in Solingen for the purpose of cutting throats, as well as a kind of rudimentary crossbar gallows on which the Serbs, Jews and Bosnians, once rounded up, were hanged in rows like crows or magpies. Not far from Jasenovac, in a radius of no more than ten miles, there were also the camps of Prijedor, Stara Gradiska and Banja Luka, where the Croatian militia, its hand strengthened by the Wehrmacht and its spirit by the Catholic church, performed one day's work after another in similar manner. The history of this massacre, which went on for years, is recorded in fifty thousand documents abandoned by the Germans and Croats in 1945 . . . "

". . . one might also add that one of the Heeresgruppe E intelligence officers at that time was a young Viennese lawyer . . ."

". . . competent in the technicalities of administration, occupied various high offices, among them that of Secretary General of the United Nations. And reportedly it was in this last capacity that he spoke onto tape, for the benefit of any extra-terrestrials that may happen to share our universe, words of greeting that are now, together with other memorabilia of mankind, approaching the outer limits of our solar system aboard the space probe Voyager II."

The recording was a complete waste of time.

Jasenovac and the countless other atrocities littering the ages of human civilization are more than enough to deter the friendly extra-terrestrials from dropping by to greet the Earthlings.

Sadly it will always be so for when the blood is up we shall always behave in our usual cowardly manner. We shall go on doing so until we obliterate ourselves. Until we become splinters of ice in the cosmos. We are driven by the madness of the crowd. We lose the capacity of independent and rational thought. Our judgement is flawed. It is our fate.

The Rings of Saturn by W. G. Sebald (1944 - 2001)
ISBN 978-0-099-44892-1
Vintage U.K. 8.99p



Grass


I am the grass. / Let me work.

There's a line somewhere. It goes: "They will say 'Where were your poets?'". It has to do with the war. The first or the second. One of those. It may one day have to do with the third world war for all anyone knows.

The German novelist and Nobel Prize winner Günther Grass has, as he sees it, broken silence and written a poem to the theme. It's general tone (in translation) is here.

Grass, like many of us, is deeply concerned that the precarious situation existing between Israel and Iran regarding nuclear weapons and potential nuclear weapons might suddenly spin out of control.

In particular he is angry because his own country, Germany, is supplying Israel with U-Boats capable of launching nuclear warheads.

He articulates the problem of Germany's guilt past and present. He says that there can be no excuses this time if things go wrong. There can be no claim of "We didn't know".

Naturally, Grass, will be labelled an anti-semite by many for his stance. He expects this.

People will also say of Grass that he is "nuts". He expects this too. It is nothing new for writers to be labelled "nuts". Some of the world's most brilliant poets were certainly "nuts". Perhaps one has to be at least a little bits "nuts" to want to write poetry. Or even to want to read it.

History teaches that you may also have to be "nuts" to want to go to war. Kings who start wars to expand their territory, or who start wars to cling to power, tend to lose their heads.

In the poppy fields the longest war in modern history, it's now 10 years, still cannot be won. The nuclear weaponed powers of Pakistan, India and China twitch in the grass in the background like nervous snakes and tigers.

Carl Sandburg said it best of all in his poem titled

Grass

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.
Shovel them under and let me work -
I am the grass; I cover all.

And pile them high at Gettysburg
And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.
Shovel them under and let me work.
Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:
What place is this?
Where are we now?

I am the grass.
Let me work.








Thursday 5 April 2012

Pablito*






. . during his orange period








* this artistic name was suggested by Gordon Mason

Monday 2 April 2012

"Another Picasso!"












postmodern series
(untitled) circa.2012

- unsigned by the artist (age 3) -