Critic Cal

Like one who takes away a garment on a cold day,         or like vinegar poured on a wound,         is one who sings songs to a heavy heart. ( Proverbs 25 :20) A particularly low point of the particularly dark advent just gone was finding myself in the middle of a particularly jolly Christmas carol knees-up at one of the bigger, shinier, more musically-polished churches in my local area. Don't get me wrong; it was an excellent evening on all objective counts. There was dancing, and whooping, and banjos, and mulled wine, and affable friends of friends I don't get to see very often. Only, to me, this was all so much coat theft and vinegar the way I was feeling, and I shivered and winced my way through just enough of the service to justify taking up a much-sought-after seat before heading for the quiet and solitude of my comfortingly un-festive house. I've more than  adequately documented my annual set-to with the season already. Pa...

There must have been evensong here long before the news of Christ. Surely for as long as there have been nights bad as this one---something to raise the possibility of another night that could actually, with love and cockcrows, light the path home, banish the Adversary, destroy the boundaries between our lands, our bodies, our stories, all false, about who we are: for the one night, leaving only the clear way home and the memory of the infant you saw, almost too frail, there's too much shit in these streets, camels and other beasts stir heavily outside, each hoof a chance to wipe him out, make him only another Messiah, and sure somebody's around already taking bets on that one, while here in this town the Jewish collaborators are selling useful gossip to Imperial Intelligence, and the local hookers are keeping the foreskinned invaders happy, charging whatever the traffic will bear, just like the innkeepers who're naturally delighted with this registration thing, and up in ...

CARRION COMFORT Not, I'll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee; Not untwist — slack they may be — these last strands of man In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can; Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be. But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me Thy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me? scan With darksome devouring eyes my bruisèd bones? and fan, O in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to avoid thee and flee?     Why? That my chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer and clear. Nay in all that toil, that coil, since (seems) I kissed the rod, Hand rather, my heart lo! lapped strength, stole joy, would laugh, chéer. Cheer whom though? the hero whose heaven-handling flung me, fóot tród Me? or me that fought him? O which one? is it each one? That night, that year Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.  Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89). Poems. 1918...

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, You cannot say, or guess, for you know only A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, And the dry stone no sound of water. Only There is shadow under this red rock, (Come in under the shadow of this red rock), And I will show you something different from either Your shadow at morning striding behind you Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; I will show you fear in a handful of dust.  (T.S. Eliot, from The Waste Land , part I: The Burial of the Dead,1922) These lines have lingered in my mind the past few days. Eliot wrote The Waste Land  in the years following the First World War, when the landscape of humanity seemed perhaps particularly stark and bleak. The poem resounds with disquiet and despair: all glimpsed respite turns out to be illusory or faltering; it seems improbable that any grounds for real...

CC from RyAwesome on Flickr I can feel the pull as far away as mid-September, when the first mince pies appear upon the shelves at Sainsbury's. The inescapability appalls me. I grasp at structure -- work, routine, the gym -- and thrash against the glitter, gluttony, commercialism, social obligation, expectations unmet and resented. Dragged disorganised, disoriented, struggling to think straight or maintain composure, losing sight of the important things in life and failing to be loving or restrain my raging selfishness...The Season sucks me in and spins me round and spits me out in January full of self-reproach and melancholy. Whilst Christmas has become, to me, a cause for annual dread, the Incarnation -- disentangled from the trappings -- draws me to increasing wonderment with every passing year. In the heart-stirringly good  Housekeeping , my new-favourite-novelist  Marilynne Robinson articulates it with compelling resonance... Memory is the sense of loss, and loss...

There's this great bit in Brave New World where Helmholtz inadvertently re-invents the lost art of poetry. In a lecture 'On the Use of Rhymes in Moral Propaganda and Advertisement', he introduces a technical example of his own: 'Pure madness, of course; but I couldn't resist it.' He laughed. 'I was curious to see what their reactions would be. Besides,' he added more gravely, 'I wanted to do a bit of propaganda; I was trying to engineer them into feeling as I'd felt when I wrote the rhymes. Ford!' He laughed again. 'What an outcry there was! The Principal had me up and threatened to hand me the immediate sack. I'm a marked man.' 'But what were your rhymes?' Bernard asked. 'They were about being alone.' Bernard's eyebrows went up. ( Aldous Huxley , Brave New World , 1931) Being alone -- or feeling any type of mental or emotional 'excess' -- is some achievement in Huxley's imagined world of r...

When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes, I all alone beweep my outcast state, And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries, And look upon myself and curse my fate, Wishing me like to one more rich in hope, Featured like him, like him with friends possessed, Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope, With what I most enjoy contented least; Sunk in these thoughts, my hapless self despising, I turn for balm to Sonnet Twenty Nine But two-thirds down, I feel my rancour rising... The Bard recants his woe, and says he's fine! Well, thanks a million, Will: my misery Was reckoning on yours for company.  ( Shakes et Cal. And I do apologise... ) So, feeling low, and low on fellow human low feeling, and betrayed thus by the Bard,  Pessoa  beckons -- as companion to my own disquiet I find him quite disquietingly meet: "I question myself but do not know myself. I've done nothing nor will I ever do anything useful to justify my existence. The part of my li...

"I do not want to be a tragic or a philosophic chorus." (Louis MacNeice, 'Wolves') What is it with my propensity to set myself up as the 'voice of gloom'? -- everything's "Kafka this" and "Nietszche that" and "Bond is trite" and "I'm too deep to have fun" and "T.S. Eliot is the only one who understands me". Last Saturday, for example (possibly in protest against the mainstream hype surrounding the latest installment of said trite franchise) I dragged a few unfortunate associates to see ' Beasts of the Southern Wild ', an intensely artsy affair with plenty of hype of its own within appropriately artsy circles (to which I evidently have pretentions). It is a poetic, dreamlike exploration of the harsh animal brutality of human existence, seen through the eyes of a 6-year old girl living with her deteriorating father in a ramshackle bayou community on the 'wrong side' of the levee bu...

Right, I need to stop subconsciously assuming the characters of the characters of every novel I read. So much for all that chat about being intentional, thoughtful, processing stuff carefully, etc etc -- apparently that only works if the fictional examples I encounter behave likewise. Latest example, The Post Office, by Charles Bukowski (a postmodern triumph!). Lots of drinking, lots of fearless bluntness, lots of job dissatisfaction. Cue an evening of unchecked work-misery-plus-too-much-red-wine-fuelled mouthing-off and generally being an arse. Followed by a morning of self-reproach-plus-back-to-work-fuelled misery, and a definite longing to chuck it all in and turn poet, if only I had Bukowski's lyricism -- I never saw such stark, brief language used to such effect! In the morning it was morning and I was still alive. Maybe I'll write a novel, I thought. And then I did. Thing is, Bukowski's three-quarters-autobiographical lead character, Chinaski, actually hides a go...

" I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly consider'd how much depended upon what they were then doing;—that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;—and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost;—Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly,—I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that in which the reader is likely to see me." ( Tristram Shandy , Gentleman. [1]) Lately, it would seem, babies have been popping out all over the place. Social networking keeps me updated of their arrivals and progress -- often in minu...

Wimbledon is here. Wait, now... didn't Beckett's Lucky have something to say about tennis? Ordered to 'think', and supplied with his requisite hat, he spouts... “Given the existence as uttered forth in the public works of Puncher and Wattmann of a personal God quaquaquaqua with white beard quaquaquaqua outside time without extension who from the heights of divine apathia divine athambia divine aphasia loves us dearly with some exceptions for reasons unknown but time will tell and suffers like the divine Miranda with those who for reasons unknown but time will tell are plunged in torment plunged in fire whose fire flames if that continues and who can doubt it will fire the firmament that is to say blast heaven to hell so blue still and calm so calm with a calm which even though intermittent is better than nothing but not so fast and considering what is more that as a result of the labours left unfinished crowned by the Acacacacademy of Anthropopopometry […] waste and ...