From ole 2013

Cleaning stuff out from my Google Drive, I found this "gem" from the Dark Ages. I am posting this here as a reminder to myself that I shall continue to be my own man and stay the Hell away from boys.

Dear friend,

My dead wife’s ghost has been circling under my bed ever since she defiled our bed and broke her bond. Each night she begs my forgiveness, shameless spirit that she is, injecting my dreams with visions of love for her.

The antlered crone with the cloak sewn from cranes said I must gather her bones and bury them. That I should lay food and drink before her mound, uttering a prayer, and that then I should cover it up, sealing the door under heaps of earth, that she may cause no further grief.

The sneaky little thing provokes me to laughter, that I may cherish her when she comes. She flatters me, knowing I am not eager to decide untruth of flattery.

Every man, woman and child knows that amor non vincit omnia. My wife is dead, but she is also the starved dog that tears open my rubbish and scatters it about, and the worm whose name is Error. But love does not care for such things, and again I am reluctant to offend her, or to do what is right, that is putting her to sleep. Dear Wilhelm, if you knew where I’ve been!

I have been to the cellars of the brain, where we keep what we must not touch. In the dusty stores I found a black box that crumbled in my hands. There was nothing in it, or there had been -- whether taken or with its vessel obliterated I don’t know. This metaphor, should I nourish or deny it? If the answer is “deny it”, will it grow monstrous with my back turned to it, fed on pride and suspicion? Will it grow fat enough to rise and demand my love and my attention? For this box, like the others, is a child of mine.

Then I stood in a green field that grew into a hill, cool with the mist of morning. The yellow moths fled the dew into the seams of my clothes, and I loved them, as I loved the yellow birds, the brown, and the black. I wept for the deaths of their sisters, and I wept for myself, who could have asked them to be spared but did not.

One of them I had met before, but did not recognise until he told me so.

He was the one that had slipped into Alastor’s collar, the night that we met so he could take my message beneath. It was the night that his eyes shone brightest. It was the night that, hiding his bloat under foxfur, he announced his final descent.

Did he do what is right, and leave this letter in my friend’s hands, said I. He had not. The messenger found love halfway down the pit, in the form of a bird that had once perched upon his shoulder, when he was young and found disease in all that was not holy. So he went back and, fearing me, did not inform me. I am not angry at him, for the Wildcat has many attendants, lovers and officiants both. I am not required at his flowery court.

The moth said as much.

Como el perro, desentierro
Lo que enterrado estaba

Fictive Kings

I.

There is freedom in slavery to a kind master. But most often one does not choose him. One is bought, and sold, given as a present. As one gives robes and mantles, heads of cattle to a king peace would have us befriend; some nations add youths, trained in the virile arts, and able-bodied female slaves.

Some slaves are born to slaves, but most were once free.


II.

Many crowns are worn in the Isle of Cats. The cats worship no gods. The victims offer themselves, or are taken without asking. King and queen are those who would call themselves such, though few of them should have a name but the scent of their cheek. With this they will sign what is theirs, and no more. Many more will disrespect the mark, and claim the object for their own. This to no disturbance in the social order.

The Isle of Cats rounds hardly ten miles, square. So the little lions must live in tolerance of each other, or be flung into the sea.

If you ask your guide if you are dreaming, she will cut you across the cheek. You will continue to doubt the sight before hand.

A white queen rubs her head to your palm. She is asking you to take her off this island. Her eyes are one green and the other blue, so she is deaf in one ear. The lady is clean, but she cannot be young. The teeth betray her three years.

She does not tell you that if you leave her she must die.

Pray you do not tarry on this port, or you will see the young cats die. The mothers take them to the dock and leave them, hoping that a kind soul may pick them, and take them to the ships. But more often they are used as bait, or die of hunger, being too young. Meanwhile the mother expects to live one more year. It is uneconomic to give suck, and give life -- work enough for one's own.

Rare are these among all cats to take up the rattsey custom. When times are rough, which is each time, they will sup on their own without ceremony.


III.

Before the king is given to the bowel of the bog, he is symbolically deprived of his name and his humanity. He is made to wear the skin of the animal, and so becomes it. It is the skin of a deer; othertimes, of a dog. It is the executor's choice whether to use the rope or the iron knife. But it is the king who first chooses to die, as his people's most valuable possession.

The people are given life in exchange for his, if the gods see that there has been, indeed, a sacrifice. The offering of a craven, or an unpromising king is counted for naught. And it is not rare for the gods, instead, to take offence at such a mean gift. Less fortunate they who offer jewels, or ointments brought from abroad, for the gods desire only for food and drink. The vanities of man and woman do not fulfill them. Sooner they take a red bead, or the promise of a great deed.

Time Out of Mind

Who is the fly that draws blood from your eye / and why do you leave it open?
How long have you known this man / that you should drink from his cup and call him brother?

The back of my neck is stiff, where the god first placed his hand and asked me to run with him.

I am old, but each day younger than I have been.

This day I see a man and a bear, standing at the edge of a wood.

Says the bear, "You speared me before I could run from you; now spare me."

This man has listened to the songs and sung them, since he was a child at his mother's breast. It is long known, by him and his people, that this is not how it ends. Time out of mind, man and bear have been brothers by law, since the Great Bear took the chief's daughter to wife, and got on her fifty sons and fifty daughters. The cousins, come of age, could not be contained, and oftener warred with each other than shared a bed or dining hall.

There is one that goes like this, as played by a small woman on a fiery drum.

Goodbrother Bear, I will hold you over the hearth fire, and share you among my kin.

I will make you into a hood, that men should be in fear of me; and I will ever wear you, that you should watch over my shoulder. When I am dead, my sons will wrap you around my shape, that you should lead me to the other world, as a friend.

If the brother wishes I will burn his skin, and his soul with it. For bearskin is a poor shield from the rain, and collects snow, that melts. When a stranger meets me, he will say that I am a man of valour, to have killed a bear and be wearing the bear skin.

I will lay the pelt with the bones that I buried under this rock, and there I will burn them. This if he gives the sign. But if the brother does not protest I will carry him on my back, even if a king asks for him, as a gift.

So it was, in the days of the fathers and grandfathers, that no man could continue to call himself a man who had surrendered the skin of his bonded brother. But the late men and women of the hill would put anything in a stranger's hand to get in turn sweet steel, and wine, and finely carved pipes, and handsome youths made slaves.

The wound is weeping near the breast. It is deep, but the man draws no nearer. Is this the time? It is the time he became a man. He does not utter breath, nor does he raise the end of his spear, the jaggedness daubed in aconite. Forgive, brother, the fair death I give you, says the man to the bear, after a long moment. There is no knowing if the bear consents, when he finally hangs his head, but there is no preparing either for the shot of lead that bursts his valve, no repairing the farmhand's reproach that he should be more careful, son, and next time bring a gun.

Mr and Mrs Eaton

Philip and Mary Eaton -- last I knew the man had sought out his wife and forgiven her, on tracing her to French Canadia from a newspaper clipping. Three weeks on she was dead under a pillow, the man mechanically fled to his wretched isle. The heart was removed from his chest, reduced to the size of a raisin and preserved in a cerecloth.

Afterward he took to gardening, everything else is diffuse.

The Picture of Health

(Undated)
“THE ROOT OF THE EVIL lies in the constitution itself, in the fatal weakening of families from generation to generation… The root of the evil certainly lies there, and there’s no cure for it.” Vicenzo

Mixed states represent a critical combination of depressed feelings and thoughts combined with an exceptionally perturbed, agitated, and unpleasant physical state, usually accompanied by a heightened energy level and increased impulsivity. Thinking can range from florid psychosis or “madness” to patterns of unusually clear, fast and creative associations, to retardation so profound that no meaningful mental activity can occur.

THE RITUALS OF ECSTATIC WORSHIP, FRENETIC DANCE AND VIOLENT DEATH WERE CYCLIC IN NATURE AND TIED TO THE SEASONS
REPLICATING DEATH AND REBIRTH

12. XII. 13
Sadly most of the dreams I remember involve dear Margaret in a deceptive or compromising position, owing to the distrust I have retained. At this pace we are condemned to part acrimoniously.

Last night however I saw the King of Moths in the shape of the child E--, dark and knobby-kneed, up to his face in dirt. He dove into the ground, parting the earth with his joined hands, in a way that made me think of a kingfisher. I remember wondering how he was not crushed by the weight of stones.

As of today my condition, physical and otherwise, is greatly diminished. I am entering one of those moods, which is so much like a softening of the brain. I cannot contain myself from drinking, though I have 50% of a grade pending, and but 20% of it done, due midnight.

I have been treating my love poorly -- it is unfair to call him a wife. I say it is because I am miserly with affection, but this is false.

I saw myself hatching a yellow bird at my breast, but children are not birds. They do not go off on their own when they have grown; one is obligated to them for life. Among the things I do not have is a career and the restraint to look after myself. Here I am, picking at the flesh of my arm -- the bird is vicious as a millipede; greedy and fat, like the babe of the cuckoo, feathering my clothes with his raiment. I love him because he is a bird and not a child -- I could not bear the heir of my body inheriting the taint of my blood.

Woe be to assortative mating! Like meeting like -- birds of a feather flocking together --

There goes a saying: “the sins of the fathers shall be revisited upon the sons”. And Margaret and I, we are not the picture of health. God bless the jittering Lady Margaret, first hid behind crassitude, and, once grown, behind duty. God help me, the inflamed brain playing the scholar. Thank the configuration of our bodies, that has not cursed us with an issue that would suffer from these ailments.

'WITH ONE CHAINED FRIEND, PERHAPS A JEALOUS FOE THE DREARIEST AND THE LONGEST JOURNEY GO'

In the odd event that we meet again -- a missive to keep in the wallet

Souls in cupped hands (a waste; tis an aether)

Sigils in red ink, burnt in the flesh

A drowned woman, dragged upstream by a bear (the face is intact)

Devils pretending to enjoy art (your friends are enthralled)

'Alástor' came to me in a dream; under the furs he was rotten. He would have sloughed had I touched him (so I did not). He would take my letters beneath, to our shared friend, but the truth is neither got back to me. His eyes shone bright, bright, bright.

He or she was an acolyte of St Patrick. Very little is known of them. On the properties of prayer: Passion may precede belief. One may not believe at all and be struck by savage guilt or beauty or benevolence all at once. The truth of this world is that there is only one and that it is continuously eating itself. The big parts eat the little ones, and the little parts swarm them. Until we plowed fields hunger was a mode of regulation, like molten rock and sea.

TAREA

WHO WERE THE BRIGHT & YOUNG?

BEVERLEY NICHOLS - ALL I COULD NEVER BE 1949
BYP - [p. 3]
It was an age of "parties." There were "white" parties in which we shot down to the country in fleets of cars, dressed in white from head to foot, and danced on a

white floor laid in the orchard, with the moonlight turning all the apples to silver, and then -- in a pale pink dawn -- playing races with champagne corks on the

surface of the stream. There were Mozart parties in which, powdered and peruked, we danced by candlelight and then -- suddenly bored -- rushed out into the street to

join a gang excavating the gas mains at Hyde Park Corner. There were swimming parties where, at midnight, we descended on some municipal baths, hired for the occasion,

and disported ourselves with an abandon that was all the fiercer because we knew that the press was watching -- and watching with a very disapproving eye.


BYP [p. 8]
Its members ranged from the rich and aristocratic -- Bryan Guinness on his marriage to Diana Mitford in 1929 was supposed to have acquired an income of L. 20,000 a

year -- to the downright disreputable. Some Bright Young People became successful writers, journalists or artists, while others plumbed the depths of drink, drugs and

disappointment.

ALAN JENKINS: the words Bright Young People became a label for all the young in Britain who did anything unusual at all

[...] Given that many of the Bright Young People were artists, albeit sometimes in very minor and inconsequential ways, their spoor can be tracked across vast acreages

of British cultural life. Their style -- brisk, affected, outwardly impersonal, inwardly often deeply vulnerable -- influenced a host of descendants who knew nothing

of their ancestry, and their echoes can be found in the pages of books written long after the movement's original members were gone. [pp. 8-9]


ON THE PHOTOGRAPH AT WILSFORD MANOR
[p. 10] It is an extraordinary portrait-- stylised, sophisticated, ultramodern, and yet, in its dandy posturing, hugely frivolous and self-centred, an image that, in

the end, conveys nothing but its own artificiality.


ET IN ARCADIA EGO
[p. 12] The influence of the Bright Young People can be felt throughout twentieth century artistic life. To take on the most flagrant examples, the London society

world of the mid- to late 1920s was a crucible in which were forged the careers of several of England's greatest novelists, one of its best-loved contemporary poets

and half a dozen leading figures in ballet, photography and surrealist painting. Beneath the surface hubbub lay, too, a deep strain of unease, often extending to

outright melancholy. Raised in the shadow of the Great War, denied most of the social and economic certainties of their parents' generation, the Bright Young People

knew, if they had any sense of perspective, that their pleasures came at a price, that somewhere in the middle distance a reckoning awaited. "It is a queer world which

the old men have left them," Evelyn Waugh wrote in a valedictory editorial for his school magazine, considering the plight of what he called "the youngest generation,"

"and they will have few ideals and illusions to console them when they 'get to feeling old.' They will not be a happy generation."


STEPHEN TENNANT AS SEBASTIAN I -- THE CULT OF YOUTH & BEAUTY
THE DAILY EXPRESS 1926 OR 27
[pp. 24-25] His appearance alone is enough to make you catch your breath -- golden hair spreading in flowing waves across a delicate forehead; an ethereally

transparent face; clothes which mold themselves about his slim figure [...]"


MANY MEETINGS
[p. 29] The median date of birth was around 1905. [...] If age brought consanguinity, then so did the alliances of school and university. Eleanor Smith and Zita

Jungman had been at Miss Douglas's establishment at Queen's Gate with Alannah Harper. The founding members of the Eton Society of the Arts in 1920 included Howard,

Yorke, Harold Acton and Anthony Powell. Evelyn Waugh and Tom Driberg first came across each other at Lansing College. Oxford, too, became a Bright Young Person's

Nursery. The legacy of the war, manifested in gruff ex-servicemen who referred to the dining hall as "mess" and the legend of the misbehaving former officer

apprehended by a proctor's bulldog who turned out to be his batman, had dissipated by about 1922, after which the most fashionable colleges, Magdalen and Christ

Church, were dominated by a new breed of undergraduates, predominantly Old Etonians notable for the flamboyance of their dress and manner.

THE 'ISIS' ON THE HYPOCRITES' CLUB:
[p. 30] The Hypocrites are perhaps the most entertaining people in the University. They express their souls in terms of shirts and gray flannel trousers and find

outlet for their artistic ability on the walls of their clubrooms. To talk to they are rather alarming. They have succeeded in picking up a whole series of

intellectual catch-phrases with which they proceed to dazzle their friends and frighten their acquaintance: and they are the only people I have ever met who have

reduced rudeness to a fine art.


GENERATIONAL DIVIDE -- SURVIVOR'S GUILT & THE HEROIC DEAD
[pp. 54-55] Coming only a few years after a devastating war that obliterated hundreds of thousands of young men, the antagonism between youth and seniority that

characterized the 1920s was of far greater significance than previous intergenerational disturbance. For all the enthusiasm for "youth," the talk of "new blood" and

the need to sweep away prewar stuffiness, the twenties, practically every commentator of the period agrees, was a difficult time to be a young man. Part of this

difficulty lay in the simple fact of his existence. Orwell, a decade later, noted the tremendous amount of guilt experienced by the young man born in the years after

1900 who, consequently, had managed to avoid military service. "The very fact of his being alive was against him," Balfour declared, "for he was thus prevented from

standing level with 'the boys who had died.'" Whatever feats he accomplished, he would always be compared, and nearly always unfavourably, with the war generation lost

in the Flanders mud.

But there was more to these anxieties than a sense of generational inferiority. To a failure to emulate the achievements of those killed in the war could be added the

insecurities of the new postwar landscape, where jobs were scarce and whole areas of employment seemed set aside for the jealous middle-aged. On the one hand the

peculiarly charged atmosphere of the 1920s, with its promise of good times and limitless horizons, had raised expectations among the young; on the other the reality of

its economic pressures had simultaneously let them down. Cyril Connolly noted the reluctance of his contemporaries to accept the routine compromises that had done for

their fathers: "They could not settle down to boring jobs and unprofitable careers with prewar patience and their cleverness seemed a liability rather than an asset."

Balfour, alternatively, identified a gap between the kind of person that the public school system had launched on the social world of the 1920s ("a gentleman and a

gentleman of leisure") and the kind of person -- tough-minded, competitive and hardworking -- required by the postwar labour market. The Bright Young Man, Balfour

thought, was "a hybrid, hovering between two worlds and two systems."

Morning Mournings

I am inclined to believe that Brideshead Revisited is a book about missed connections & misunderstandings, of, yes, thwarted passion; of giving a sad proud look when one should weep; of the “well then”. Most of the characters try too hard, or not enough.

Charles left, after being made a sufferer. I suppose missing Sebastian was better than sharing in the misery – but the smell of summer, made the stench of sickness, is not one that washes off. It is a dark stain on the breast.

Stifled grief, English charm – composure. So he wore the mask and saw himself become it. So growth stilled.

APRIL IS THE CRUELLEST MONTH, BREEDING
LILACS OUT OF THE DEAD LAND, MIXING
MEMORY AND DESIRE, STIRRING
DULL ROOTS WITH SPRING RAIN

Eliot

Yellow finches dart in pairs, unencumbered by Fate, no red string to trip them in their flight. It is said this long red string is used by men to remember the way out – as one lost in a dark wood, where trunks make walls and rivers rush beneath the earth, to swallow one if he missteps. (Of course one is never in danger – a tug and one misses a trap – as if a strange god whispered, Turn left, turn left, one unaware they had heard him.)

I do not think a finch would know what that is.

Man should know the string for a safety – fallible, as in truth it may be cut. But men live of what isn’t theirs. (You can’t live off what isn’t yours!)

                TRUTH IS AN ODD NUMBER, THERE IS SAFETY IN A TRIAD

The dead come out the strangest doors. The wan face a familiar sight, all fear is struck from one. (What one fears is the lifting of veils.) The smile is a stiff lip on yellow waxwork. Still there is light in the eyes – a taxidermist’s prize, such shine one would think they had blinked away a tear. Our precious dead! Are we not ghosts all, loves and hates and curious scenes, misremembered? A distortion, approximation, which is imagination, (which is Poetry, which is Truth).

What is dead will go the moment one raises a trembling hand – to the face, perhaps, in a fever of feeling. If dead men have fevers of feeling I do not know. The dead may stir in alien ways. For even the soulless are capable of some fondness, a detached benevolence, in spite of their diminished capacities.

The small man in spectacles no longer says, “My wife is lost at sea!” She has come to him in dreams, mottled and bent, to tell him of her marriage to a sea-prince.

Come morning he coughs a wad of green. A piece of soul is broken off and drifted, like an aether, not to be held in cupped hands or blown on lover’s lips.

Ah, to have many affections in place of one mad love! That is what he should have done. Grief would be brief (being not quite grief, then). “Wait, wait, give me a minute,” to put a stopper to the wound as easily as one caps a bottle.

Ah, had he not loved his wife…!

When they wed he did not care much for her. Then he was certain of everything. That she was a practical, sensible sort; that she would have his best interests in mind, and try not to make him unhappy. A good prospect, in appearance unremarkable.

One night he woke from a dreadful dream, since forgotten. (Vines, and vines, and damp.) Crinkling an eye at the back turned to him – the curve of that bone! That steady breath – he knew he loved her then. For quite some time, he had loved her; but it was then that it hit him, that he was made aware of the fact. “Well then,” he said, for in his many years he had never been in love, and knew it not as a cruel master.

A year from then she was sailing the Atlantic. Misty-eyed, she promised him a letter; she gave him her love, though he knew she’d find another. All her things, she too shipped west, answering thus the question of return. She had lost something he could not see, she said, and could not help her find. A burden, he would be – this, in kinder words. (“You would not know it,” which is a form of saying, “You do not know me.”)

In a week the ship was wrecked, her bones picked clean by bottom-feeders.

(“Do terns flock here in the summer? Do they hatch soft, speckled babes?”

Location

“That was somewhere else.” There lives a shade of myself, who faces West at the cry of gulls, and dreams of mine own sorrow; a small man like myself, when I had but one chin, and bled brackish blood.

I’d call my man at Ingolstadt to electrify my loins, if sheer vigour were enough to rouse you from the deep. If white worms grace your chest like flowers, slick stalks nibbling here and there, I will tie them head to tail in a funereal wreath.)

Psicoanalízame ésta.

To Margaret:

Voice of velvet, voice that cracks:
Drunken, reeling, thread of spit –
Relic of that ancient cult,
Of Fiction dispossessed, of
Structure as the common Lɪᴇ:

That, she’s found in a tipping glass.
Drinking deep, she flits, my Margaret,
‘tween curtains, veils,
The coloured panes of glass,
That distract the church-goer, who,
All in all, believes very little.

Flitting from distortion to another,
Each a different face, each herself,
Oh, then somebody else’s –
What it is, to choose a costume over the other!
In choosing one’s skin, one chooses their enemy.

If the world is shattered when the rum is gone,
Shall we weep?

Already, she is made blind,
Stupid, senseless,
The last drop is downed, and
She is transported –
Another brightness cleared –
All is one, all is all (said the baseless philosopher),
That is the Reveller’s one Tʀᴜᴛʜ.

One could say that her ankle
May twist or break,
Her voice be drowned,
Body placed in shallow waters,
For the gentle fish to tear asunder,
For the mother croc to feed her babes;
But the last veil will be dropped:
This is of no consequence.

O, the last veil will be dropped,
The last pane smashed to rainbow dust,
That is to lungs like razor.
Only then is she most herself,
Being all the selves, all the masks
Of joy or obligation.
(No questions are asked to stones,
Cool, unchanging; or to running water,
Rushing river, interminable drivel.)

The true face is a conjunction,
Of sawdust and steel, but
Crueller than sweet, sharp of
Cheek, gut of boiling bile.
Like Orlando, she was discovered a man
only after.