Just Sad

The Pound of the final pages of Moody's biography is by far the most sympathetic version of the man offered across the three volumes it comprises. The account of the intense depression suffered by the poet in his final years made for grim reading. Something seemed to break in him, and his occasional acknowledgements that he'd got it all wrong and spoiled everything struck me as bitingly sincere, not least because of their obvious truth.

Why did it take him so long to see this? I suppose because the cost of seeing it was so monumental.

Mind you, he was incredibly lucky in terms of the support he received in those years from the various women in his life. Moody does a good job of spelling out the entanglements EP got himself into romantically without becoming overly prurient or judgemental, but I can't help but point out that it's difficult to defend the poet's behaviour, especially towards the younger women. Indeed, I'd say that Olga Rudge is the one character from it all who emerges as a figure to unequivocally admire. I reckon she's worth a biography all of her own. 

Conflicted

EP has just got out of St Elizabeths in my reading of Moody's brilliantly detailed and even-handed biography. It's proving an odd read insofar as I assumed Pound would have deeply regretted his anti-Semitism post-war, but this is clearly not the case. So no matter what the level of sympathy one feels for him regarding his incarceration, that sympathy is necessarily compromised. And it doesn't help that he embodies the worst kind of intellectual arrogance. Not a nice man. Yet generous to others and admired by many despite it all. I reckon I stand with William Carlos Williams with regard to how I feel about Pound, and since Williams is eminently sane I think that's a pretty good place to be.

Real Service

It is with considerable relief that I record the fact that we finally managed to submit an on-line application to renew Noi's passport this evening. We've been trying to do so for over a month, but the webpage you need to fill in had consistently rejected every version we tried to submit of a photograph for the passport. We'd followed up by trying to ring the office here responsible for the issuing of the passport, but it was impossible to get through, and emailing the office about the problem, but never receiving a reply.

I doubt that we would have ever succeeded had it not been for the assistance of the young lady, a Ms Lee, at the photography shop where we had the latest photo taken. Actually, she'd tried to help up a few weeks back, but we didn't get anywhere, and on that occasion she hadn't charged us anything for her services. That stuck me as extremely generous since we had certainly taken up her time, a good twenty minutes or more. Tonight she helped us get everything done, and was incredibly patient for the hour or so it took.

As far as I can gather, this is what she's been doing for those who come to the shop with the same problem. Talk about going beyond the call of duty! Further evidence, if we needed it, that the world is kept turning by the 'ordinary' workers we manage to take entirely for granted until we suddenly figure out how 'key' they are to our lives.

Listening Hard

In recent weeks I've taken to occasionally listening to spoken word stuff on YouTube - radio plays, audiobooks and the like. There's an abundance of it and most is of excellent quality. The problem for me is that listening is so wonderfully comfortable that it's easy to nod off. I even struggled to stay awake in a strikingly powerful radio adaptation of le Carre's Call for the Dead which struck me as better than the original novel.

I'll just have to work harder at listening harder. Always a good thing.

Leaving There

Last Saturday I was praising the comfort offered the reader by Philip Pullman in La Belle Sauvage. That was before I reached the second half of the story and the great flood navigated by Malcolm and Alice and baby Lyra. There's precious little comfort on offer in the second part of the novel, but plenty of visceral discomfort and an overwhelming sense of threat, such even though you know Lyra has to survive to play out His Dark Materials you're fairly dubious that she will make it beyond eight months of age.

Pullman is brilliant at suggesting the real heroism of Malcolm and the wonderfully surprising Alice lies in just how genuinely terrified and depressed they are by what is expected of them and yet do what is needed in a way that seems entirely realistic. The sequence in which Malcolm throws up as a result of the terror he feels is one of the most convincing evocations of physical fear I've ever read.

I didn't want the story to finish, but I'm glad it did.

Oh, and the illustrations by Chris Wormell are stone cold perfect.

Making Demands

I thought I might finish La Belle Sauvage before the weekend. The narrative power of the novel is such that it takes some effort to break off from reading, and Pullman's inventiveness is particularly dazzling in the second half of the novel. But there have been plenty of demands upon me - and by no means unreasonable ones - such that I can't see completing it ahead of the morrow. I've just arrived at the last chapter and I don't want to rush it. Pullman demands reading, but he also demands full attention for the reader to enjoy the unorthodox gifts of his fiction.

Also we spent most of the evening over in Woodlands celebrating Rozita's birthday, answering to the demands of family togetherness, the happiest demands of all.

Not Exactly As Usual

The last time I found myself in a mosque for Friday Prayers was back at the beginning of April, so it was a delight and a relief in roughly equal proportions to get back to Masjid Darussalam this afternoon. I was also fortunate to get the opportunity since we are restricted to just 100 worshippers at any one time, distancing being very strictly observed. Fuad helped me apply on-line for a place and it'll be another three weeks before I'm allowed to try again for a booking. So we're not exactly back to normal.

And the prayers themselves didn't feel quite normal, despite the comforting familiarity of the experience. Not praying shoulder to shoulder and wearing a mask feels odd - but completely right, given the circumstances. I was also lucky in that the khutbah was in English, as were sections of the prayers normally said in Malay. At one point we were praying for those who'd lost their jobs, more specifically that they'd find something better. It felt sharply sad to do so.

Went The Day Well?

A day of noise - cheerfully exuberant - and silence - warmly comforting. And lots in between. Including a fair amount of cake and kueh and cookies. A day to settle for.

The Unbearable Heaviness Of Being

I'm annoyed with myself. I don't know how I managed to do it, but I'm a good 2 kg over my fighting weight for no reason I can think of. I've not exactly been gorging lately - and completely forgot to eat until the early evening one day last week, such were the demands on my time. I suppose not being able to go to the gym has something to do with it.

The funny thing is that I feel as if I've been giving my old body quite a pounding in terms of keeping moving during the day, yet the old body in question seems to have decided to expand itself as if it's been having a nice relaxed lie-down. It's all irritatingly paradoxical, but you can't argue with the scales, can you?

Being Present

I was thinking back the other day to the time my sister, Maureen, got married - her first marriage to Colin, that is. I don't remember much at all of the wedding, but I can vividly recall how I felt on the evening of the day. By that time the married couple had gone off on their honeymoon and I was with Mum and Dad in the room behind the shop on Guide Lane. I'm certain that up to that moment I hadn't thought at all in real terms about what it would be like without my sister at home because the feeling of something close to complete devastation, a kind of emptiness, took me entirely by surprise. I don't know how long it lasted, but I know how it felt that evening.

How old was I? I think I'm right in assuming I was twelve. Maureen married when she was nineteen - which seems very young now, but was quite normal at the time. So I suppose I was still pretty much a child. I say this because the memory brought home a realisation to me regarding the way young kids experience others, specifically those close to them. I reckon that Mums and Dads and Grans and Grandads, and anyone who's always around, always there, are experienced as much as presences as they are as individuals.

They sort of fill all the empty spaces in a way that I think most of us experience as deeply comforting. And part of the painful process of growing up is getting cut off from those presences and coping with the loss.

Thinking that made me consider for a moment what it must be like for those denied that kind of security - or, worse, those who must deal with presences that embody some kind of threat. But it's almost too painful to go there.