The Living Word

Just finished reading Wodwo as it is represented in the Collected Poems. This means there was none of the prose to read as it's all been omitted, understandably so. My paperback of the collection is in KL, so I've had to put up with the feeling of missing something important, but since the poems are so brilliant I can live with the temporary loss.

And just how brilliant the collection is came home to me with the triple whammy of the final three poems: Gnat-Psalm, Full Moon and Little Frieda and Wodwo itself. The variations of style, tone and voice mean they could be by three different writers, yet somehow they are all authentic Hughes.

I couldn't help but notice that the last line of the poem which immediately precedes them, The Howling of Wolves, is in itself, in miniature, the work of a great master: The night snows stars and the earth creaks. Isn't that just gorgeous? - and in context so perfect, The Howling of Wolves being one of those poems I've sort of always taken for granted as being typical Hughes yet which came ferociously alive for me this time round.

Dipping In

I acquired my satisfyingly chunky copy of the revised version of Sid Smith's In the Court of King Crimson on my last foray to the Book Depository. Soon after it came into my clammy paws I decided not to indulge myself in a cover-to-cover read of what for me was the ultimate fanboy biog. And why not? Well, I'd read the original, published in 2001, a couple of times and was steeped in Crimson lore regarding the years up to the 1990s, so revisiting all this sequentially somehow wasn't so attractive. Indeed, I was keen to jump straight to the later years, and jump I did with fascination, such that it struck me that a very cunning plan might be to read the tome in a sort of random fashion. This would involve deliberately dipping in at a point when I just happened to be listening to something from that period and sort of randomly felt the need to know what lurked behind the musical treasure that unfolded from that particular version of the Beast.

This plan has proven exceptionally cunning in that it has served as a reminder of the inherent randomness of the making of great music. There's nothing inevitable about the right musicians coming together at the right time. When it happens we're lucky and need to celebrate that good fortune as a triumph against the odds.

Of course, it helps that Mr Smith writes so very well.

Clicking

Of late I've been listening hard, but not hard enough, to some of the symphonies of Sir Malcolm Arnold. They haven't clicked for me in the way those of RVW did years ago, but I know there are riches involved and I'm determined to get at least some understanding of the treasure.

That's the advantage of being brought up in a system that told you that high culture was something you needed to live up to. I've never lost that sense of the need to learn enough to gain access to rarefied worlds beyond me and although it's a bit of a silly idea all told, and it smacks of the breeding of a kind of empty pretentiousness, it's worked for me in the past and continues to do so.

The moment that it all clicks is the moment you realise there was always more to you than met the eye. Even your own.

Complicity

For quite some time now I've been puzzled by the behaviour of many Republicans in office in the U.S. who obviously know their sad emperor has no clothes yet won't point this out, even now it's clear that the Republic itself is genuinely in danger. Today I got to read a brilliant analysis of the situation by Anne Applebaum that seeks to answer the question: Why have Republican leaders abandoned their principles in support of an immoral and dangerous president?

Her answer is clear, cogent and entirely convincing - and should be compulsory reading for all who care for the Republic (and if not for this republic, then for democracy in general.)

Time And Time Again

Had an odd experience this afternoon. We were rehearsing a 'live event' for a forth-coming Open House and I was assigned the easy role of audience, meaning I was monitoring the real work being done by the others presenting and producing. One of the many technical problems that needed solving was the issue of lag time. The producer pressed the requisite button (or whatever) and the something that needed to happen did so on screen, but only after some ten seconds had gone by. So I was getting a double exposure, being in the same room as one of the presenters and hearing the presentation both in real time and ten seconds later. All well and good; the old ears and brain sort of gradually adjusted.

But as the rehearsal wore on the lag became more protracted. Eventually what I heard in real time came to the screen a good six minutes later. Let me tell you, this was very disorienting. Like being trapped in a deja vu tunnel. But sort of fun, if you didn't try too hard to figure out where in the tunnel you were located.

Then this evening, once my brain had unfried itself, it came to me that for most of this month of June I'd been vaguely troubled by a sense of living through two versions of the month. In real time there was the actual June of school and teaching and in unreal time there was the june that would have been, the june like previous uncluttered junes stretching out over thirty years plus, the june of letting go and hanging loose and not being terribly fussed about anything at all.

In a funny brain-fried fashion it's sort of okay to have both.

Beyond Reason

Earlier this week I made a little vow - even writing it down somewhere - that somehow or other I would carve out time to watch Herzog's Aguirre, Wrath of God and the latest production being streamed by the National Theatre, Small Island, a very highly rated adaptation of a novel by Andrea Levy. In the event I find I have failed to fulfil that vow, owing to a sort of strategic error. I knew I was going to be busy with the Toad, Work, but I didn't reckon on quite how busy. That meant I was never going to find time to watch both ahead of the weekend. And foolishly I opted to view the movie first, essentially because I just couldn't stop myself. I completely forgot there was a deadline on the NT's streaming, and that deadline arrived today. Just now I glanced at the opening segment of Small Island and recognised right away it's my kind of show. Except it now can't be because I just can't fit in in.

I've even had to break up my viewing of Aguirre into four segments watched on four different days. That meant that it wasn't quite as an immersive experience as the first time I watched it years back, but possibly that was a good thing as it's such a powerful and disturbing film that it was a bit of a relief to break it up. But having said that, I found the potent images Herzog conjures up still hypnotise.

Indeed, I think those final shots of the raft spinning on the river, taken over by the small monkeys, with Klaus Kinski the last man standing in the wreckage of his dreams hit me harder today than it did when I first saw it. I think years back I vaguely wondered what Herzog meant by breaking off the story at that point; now I don't bother to think at all, knowing that as with most of the film we're in territory way beyond the rational.

After Such Knowledge?

By the time of the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King I had some awareness of the terrible injustice of slavery in America and its protracted aftermath, through the Civil Rights movement. I was twelve in 1968 and I'm guessing now that consciousness of such matters had come to me in the two years prior to that, since I can't remember my younger self reacting in a particularly visceral manner to any story of injustice prior to this - though, of course, there would have been plenty. I was thinking of this today in relation to the current growth in our collective consciousness in relation to racial injustice in the U.S. (and elsewhere) - though I should qualify that by noting that this more particularly appertains to a growth of such consciousness outside the black community.

It's telling how the spate of video evidence of police brutality towards black people in the U.S. over the past few years, and especially the last two or so, has helped foster an understanding that such brutality has been and is more routine than those distant from it, like myself, ever really were able to accept. I don't mean I ever doubted the reality in any deep way, but the lived reality sort of remained beyond comprehension somehow. And still does, I suppose, since this is not a threat that I've ever faced or had to deal with.

This came home to me with special force yesterday when I was reading a piece on Open Culture relating to the great Miles Davis being beaten by the cops in New York at the time of the recording of Kind of Blue. I don't think I'd come across the particular story before, but I had some awareness that Miles had had his fair share of run-ins with the boys in blue, as had probably every black jazz musician of note in that era. Despite knowing this, and feeling an appropriate sense of anger at the gross injustice involved in all this, somehow I'd never felt quite as outraged as I did reading of this assault. I'm guessing that it's my recent sort of enhanced knowledge of what really takes place all too often on the streets that led to this intensity of feeling. And it gave me that bit more understanding of what drives so many on the streets to protest.

Forbidden Fruit, And Rightly So

My heart went out to those poor Bavarian post office workers recently assailed by the odour of the King of Fruits, so-called. Methinks a world-wide ban is in order. But the Missus, of course, wouldn't agree. And nor would most of the population of this Far Place.

People are strange.

Really Scared

I've arrived at Wodwo on my read-through of the Hughes's Collected and I'm finding myself reminded of just how deeply troubling, disturbing, unsettling so many of the poems in the book felt when I first read them and remain so today. More so, I think. In youth I had youth to protect me from them and the surreal puzzling quality so many possessed helped provide some distance.

They still puzzle - the weaker ones beyond the redemption of meaning - but the fully achieved pieces now seem to have a power I somehow didn't grasp when younger. Possibly a good thing that I didn't back then. I read Ghost Crabs over the weekend, and again today. Once upon a time I found it fascinating, but essentially saw it as little more than a kind of uncannily animated dream. Now it actually frightens me.

I suppose I used to wonder what the titular crabs represented. Now I know they are real: They are the powers of this world. / We are their bacteria, / Dying their lives and living their deaths.

As Usual

Just bade farewell to the one and only set of visitors we will see in the post-Raya period, tomorrow being the final day of the month of Syawal and the sort of 'official' end to such proceedings. And how good it was to see Fuad, Rozita, Fifi and Fafa live, as it were, after three months of necessary disconnection. It's nice to think that such reunions will have been taking place all over this Far Place this weekend, and are likely to continue to do so for the days immediately ahead of us.

I'm fortunate in being able to deal with solitude better than most, indeed, to have a marked capacity for enjoying it. I'm not one of Streisand's People Who Need People, so not one of the luckiest in the world in that respect, but there's a lot to be said for the virtues of connectedness and I'm happy to celebrate them.