PIHW 6 Good Friday in Holy Week - Church visiting

For reasons that are not entirely clear to me as an atheist, I make a real effort to visit a church on Good Friday.  I do not stay for a service and sometimes my visit is fleeting, but I feel a need to visit a church on Good Friday. 

     This year because of Covid-19 and the lockdown visiting a church was impossible.  And I surprised myself by how much I felt the loss. 

     As I always describe myself as an Anglican Atheist it is easy to suppose that my desire is a nagging fag-end of the faith that I once had trying to get me back.  But I truly do not think that this is so.  I am comfortable with my atheism, but I am equally comfortable with accommodating my knowledge of the Bible and the liturgy of the Anglican Church together with Hymns Ancient and Modern, a smattering of Christian theology and the history of religion, knowledge of the Lives of the Saints and their depiction in art, and a working knowledge of Church Architecture!  A chunk of my cultural background in grounded in Christianity and is an essential part of who I am, but I simply do not have the Christian Faith.

     I am also aware of the “methinks he doth protest too much” argument which avers that my very avowal of atheism masks my essential faith in Christianity.  I think not, but I have friends who are totally convinced by such an assessment.

     I feel comfortable in churches, but especially in smaller, older, more restrained Anglican churches like Saint Augustine’s in Rumney, which is a solid barn-like building with fewer of the gory Baroque excesses of Roman Catholic decoration.  But I do get some satisfaction from churches that are far from my parochial ideal.

     So, in the following poem I have tried to express what I feel about the fact that I have broken the tradition of visiting a church on Good Friday and I also try to address a part of what I feel that I do when I write.

Church visiting

Dexterity for me is

jabbing, interrupted glide

across and up and down

well-polished keys.

My fingers feel for words,

they know where letters are

without my thought,

and thus I draw my pictures

without pen,

my comfortable places:                               

book-lined walls,

a well-placed lamp,

a polished-sturdy desk,

a back-supporting chair,

a white-clear screen.

Is all.  I tell myself.  I need.

And yet.  Today I am denied.

Today I go to church.

To any church.

Only for moments.

For one day in the year.

Today’s the day.  Today.

It’s what I do.

But I’m to house confined.

And now I find

that all my fingers can

in conjuring a place, the sounds,

the smells, the feel of pews,

the gleam of glass, the statues’

glassy stares, the shuffles of

the Others there, are not enough.

I am not there.  Enough.

My words are not enough.

I need a ‘there’.

Because I want to take

and not to give.  Today.

One day to take.

And I have been denied,

more than a day.

PIHW 5 Maundy Thursday - Choice

Sometimes you feel that you are living through important times, life-changing times – and sometimes you are.  I do not have a World War as part of my memory and those times where the world has allegedly changed I did not feel that I was an integral part of that process.  It was as if the change was something important that was going on outside my everyday experience and it could be relayed to me by television and the press, dressed up by columnists informing me about how the days we were living through were significant; I could read about it in books later and see the historic period that I had daydreamed through in its proper context.

     The 3-day week; the Miners’ Strike; The Falklands Conflict; The Cold War; wars various and international; the EU; Brexit; The Financial Crash and all the other events.  I went on working and getting paid.  What really changed?

     One feels that Covid-19 is something that must (surely) make a lasting difference.  People have died.  The whole of our way of life has been disrupted.  Our political masters have been at best inept and at worst criminally culpable.  Things cannot be the same after the crisis is over.  Or can they?

     The poem today considers memory and how we deal with it.  The horrific journey I made from Turkey to Wales in the 1980s was one that I swore I would never smile about; it was just too awful to be softened by time into something acceptable.  But it was so softened and has become something I can look back on and remember with affection.

     I am not saying that the present crisis is going to be something that we can look back on and smile, though I am sure that there will be funny aspects of it for individuals – as long as they survive.  And it is that survival that is a crucial aspects of the crisis.

     We are all involved in the crisis because we are in lockdown.  But I don’t know anyone who has had the virus and I therefore don’t know anyone who has died.  Every day we have statistics that point out the numbers of the infected around us and the number of the dead – but none of them are those we know.  So the crisis is real and at the same time unreal.  We believe what we are told but have no experience of what the statistics say.  So how, eventually, will we look back on this time.

     As we are literally in the middle of the crisis (geographically and statistically) we have a long way to go before hindsight can come into play.  But the poem speculates now.

 

 

 

Choice

I told myself I’d never smile

when I recall what I endured

on foot, by car, in taxi, plane and bus

to get from Turkey back to Wales:

English swearing, foul-mouthed scrum;

threatened Tarom Airway clerk;

German, shouting, lost it, gone;

Russian wanting to defect;

Cyclist, Czech with eyes on West;

baying crowds for Tarom blood!

Details thump back as I think

with anger, pain and disbelief.

But let the narrative go hang

on spoken scraps that I can list:

“The plane is full!  Join other queue!”

“There might be.  Another one.”

“No pounds!  No dollars!  Only lei!”

“Do you drink Vodka, and with Coke?”

“What?  London flight is gone!  Is gone!”

“Calmo!  Calmo!  Calmo!”

“An hour, or maybe two – who knows?”

“This ticket doesn’t get a seat.”

But I’m chuckling as I write,

the nightmare gentled into tale.

But.

Some memories will always hurt

beyond the smile of edited recall,

because it’s simply right they should.

Sharpness blunts with time, they say,

but the unwary, careless thought

can snag and rip the opening wound

(that never, ever, really healed) and

the old lemon’s squeezed again

in open eyes that bring the brine

to soak away the stubborn stains

hid out of sight, but not of mind

of deaths, mistakes, and nastiness,

chicanery dressed up as truth,

the lies, from grey to black and white,

and things that live in metaphor:

the accusations from faith past

of things undone and those things done

and there’s no health.

And how will we look back on this,

when we’ve decided where we are,

and just how is it we’re involved,

when all mortality is ‘over there’

and death is nobody we know?

PIHW 4 Wednesday in Holy Week - Temptation

This poem developed from a thought about isolation and being forced onto one’s own resources – even though in the present circumstances for many those resources are extensive. 

      My mind went to the monk’s cell, that featureless abode of the single holy man where the very lack of distractions was to encourage contemplation.  The theory was good, but the practical was a little different.  Left to their own devices Monks could get bored, were afflicted with what used to be termed Acedia, regarded as a grave sin because it denied joy in the creation of god and it also allowed the development of sexual thoughts.  Monks needed to be kept busy because, forced in on their own resources, too often the release was sex or at least sexual thoughts!

     Anyway, my mind moved on from monks’ cells to The Temptation of Saint Antony – a popular subject for painters.  The popularity of the subject matter was because it allowed artists to give full scope to their imaginations.  In the story of the temptation, Saint Antony is assailed by devil and demons, but the exact form of his temptation is never made explicit, so artists made the not unreasonable assumption that the temptation was sexual and I have to say that in some of the depictions of the poor saint the artists have expended a great deal of fantastic imagination and disturbing detail on giving form to temptations which probably say a great deal more about the psychological state of the artists than it does about their understanding of things theological!

     It is easy to find representations of The Temptation of Saint Antony in art, just type the title into Google and bring up the images and you will probably see examples by Dalí, Ernst, Bosch, Grünewald, Spencer, Delvaux and Leonora Carrington and many others.

     I do not think that many people have time for contemplation – although what precisely they are actually ‘doing’ is moot.  We can amuse ourselves with almost infinite ease: libraries, art galleries, cinemas, theatres, opera houses, musicals, TV shows and on and on are all available at the click of a button as long as you have money and the internet.  And then there are drinks and drugs!

     The Covid-19 crisis has forced at least a modicum of introspection on us as we have been quartered in our ‘cells’.  That is hardly a fair comparison as we have ways ‘out’ of our confinement.  But for many it is true confinement and for all of us it is a limit on our freedom.

     I suppose that my final thought is that our basic drives are not too far submerged in a civilized character and that it doesn’t take much for the sex and monsters to rise up!

 

PIHW 4 Wednesday in Holy Week

 

Temptation

It’s always sex.

Paint slather-squeezed on canvases, 

pigmented tempera laid down on wood.

It’s always sex.

With nubile possibility, a-wrthe, a-squirm,

available!

It’s always sex.

It may be quite grotesque

(the pulchritude found in technique,

the loving detail, sharp and clear)

the flesh-near, putative consort

that yearns to stretch, devour and slash

with razor claws and sharp fanged jaws –

but, there will be hard-nippled breasts

and coiling, snaking, tongue-filled mouths

that search for virgin nakedness

beneath the stout, rough, holy cloth.

It’s always sex.

We think that we’ve outgrown the mirror’s lie

of that false world we see and take for truth;

we now have more self-images to hand

than graced the palaces of High Renaissance kings;

we move about a world that’s ours to touch

and knowledge that is free, at hand,

and we believe that we are almost civilized,

until we’re not

                                    and we are banished to

a single cell, where we are forced to look

inside, and find that there be dragons and

it’s always sex.  And monsters.

PIHW 1 Palm Sunday - Process

Of course there is nothing to stop my writing a poem about anything I fancy.  I could completely ignore what is going on in the wider world and in my own little world of Castelldefels and write about something a million miles away from the threat of Covid-19.  But, even if I did choose subject matter ostensibly unrelated to the virus, it would still be understood as poetry being produced at the time of Covid-19 and be seen as a reaction to it – if only as rejection of it!

     In previous Poems in Holy Week (PIHW) I have said that the poems could be seen as a sort of poetic diary, and I think that this year is going to be no different, with Covid-19 forcing itself into all areas of life!

     In previous years I have at least been able to, in Tony Hancock’s words to describe his mother’s gravy, ‘move about a bit’, but this year is different.  For three weeks I have not been outside except to take the rubbish to the communal bins.  Once.  Tomorrow I might have to get money and go to the shops.  We’ll see.  This year is anything but normal and the normal narrative of a week has been put on hold.  But the poems will be written!

The first poem, whose draft follows, takes as a starting point the exercise that I do each day.  We are fortunate that we live in a three storey house; we have gardens back and front; a good sized terrace, and a communal pool.  As I cannot go to the local indoor pool for my customary early morning swim, I have had to make do with circling the pool each morning on foot.  It is far too cold to venture in and does the virus thrive in outdoor pools?  Our pool is next to a tennis court and two other communal pools set in gardens.  We are separated from the other dwellings by high fences and walls.

     Considering how many people live around us, I see very few of them on my circular walks and, as we all seem to have earphones firmly plugged in when I do se them, there is very little interaction in terms of conversation.

     When you are confined, it is almost impossible not to let the mind drift, no, not drift, more like forge outwards from confinement into the wider world.  My mind did that while playing a sort of game by trying to think of all the places that I had been to in different countries beginning with the sound of the first letter of my home city of Cardiff and my adopted city of Castelldefels.   I was lulled into thinking this easy because of the linking of the first two cities; the rest took some thought and, obviously, thinking and walking was not my strong suit as I managed to catch the edge of a sandal on a slightly prominent tile edge and I came to the abrupt stop that happens when you try to go down a step that isn’t there!

     Apart from the people working in the house next door, doing construction work that they shouldn’t, this area is unnaturally quiet.  For Catalonia.  A barking dog or children playing now stand out!

     The poem ends with a ‘gesture’ that, unlike the UK where I think it is only on a Thursday evening, people come out every night and applaud the health workers and the front line essential workers who keep us going during the crisis.

The title of the poem should be taken as a verb and as a noun, and as a nod to the day and also to the position that we are all in.

     I suppose that the poem is about confinement and freedom and about what it means during this time where norms do not seem to exist.

It is difficult to imagine that the final sequence of poems will be anything other than a comment on the crisis, but I am interested to see the direction that it takes!

If you have any comments to make after reading the poem please feel free to leave them and I will respond to any and all!

Please also bear in mind that this is very much a draft of what I will finally be satisfied with.  It is work in progress!

Daily Poem 1 – Palm Sunday

Process

Around the pool,

my daily walk,

square, pebbled tiles are

different, and yet the same,

are set in nearly perfect lines

where, as I walk

around, around, around,

excitement’s found in an

occasional slight tilt,

an inclined plane

along my regimented route,

where sandal’s catch on thin-lipped traps

bring footstep juddering to halt

a line of playful cartographic thought,

free drawn on coasts of memory:

Cardiff, Cannes, Castelldefels,

Cancun, Kiev and Kettering,

Çınarcık, Corfu, Kos, Cape Cod,

Carlisle and Copenhagen

        

but by that step

I’m back.  Contained within the

exercise of freedom caged by

insubstantial bars and flimsy fences,

open gates and keys to hand.

I’m solitary, but not alone.

I see and hear adjacent lives:

the gardened rat-dog’s goaded yips

at preening cat, fence-safe-secure;

bound siblings play around parked cars,

and joggers, tennis court confined

run widdershins to my progress

together, separate, safe distances apart

until, at eight pm, and on the dot,

the first staccato crack of palm on palm

brings us all out alone, a part of something

blended in applause!

It is easy to think of the current pandemic as an enemy, and much of the rhetoric of our leaders has centred on words like “invasion”, “fight”, “struggle”, “foreign” and the like, with Trump (of course) being the most naturally xenophobic, racist and unreasonable in his characterization of the virus.  He is the most belligerent and bellicose, missing (of course) the irony inherent in his being someone who ducked military service in Viet Nam though the fictional ‘bone spurs’ – when he had the opportunity to demonstrate his ‘real’ militarism, he chickened out.  It is characteristic of the coward that he is, that his previous ‘war’ was on undocumented immigrants, and of course the Mexican ‘rapists’, ‘murderers’ and ‘drug dealers’.  A war conducted, as all his ‘wars’ are from the safety of the White House and the golf course.

     In my case Conscription ended in 1960, when I was ten, and Harold Wilson did not take the UK into the Viet Nam War.  All other wars and skirmishes were dealt with by the regular army-  I could, as a charmed Baby Boomer, go through life with social silver spoon in my ever open mouth!  Or at least, given the circumstances of a person growing up in the UK nowadays, it certainly seems that the metaphor is not too far-fetched.

     The preparations and reactions to the virus by the governments around the world certainly put one in mind of armed conflict, indeed the Coward Trump has directly compared the (eventual) state of preparedness that his contemptable administration has been forced to accept is tantamount to War.

     As pronouncements are broadcast and ever more stringent positions are adopted to cope with the virus, it is difficult not to think in terms of General Mobilization.  

     The inspiration for this poem is directly stated in the opening stanza: it did cross my mind. And then the rest followed.

     I write from the point of view of a Baby Boomer born in 1950, five years after the end of World War II, and a being who began to take note of his surrounding and more importantly remember what he saw in about 1953/4.  When I was growing up in a suburb of Cardiff there were still ruins from the war in parts of the city; the war figured large in television and film; the war and its aftermath still defined who we thought that we were.  It took the Suez Crisis (that I do remember in my own child-centred way) to put us firmly in our ‘second-rank-and-falling’ state that has possibly culminated in the collective idiocy of Brexit.

     From the point of view of the generation now coming up to school leaving age (without doing their final exams?) my generation had a charmed way through life in Britain.

     My father was sporty (he captained the school rugby team when he was in the third form) and clever (he came top in his class in his grammar school – though that achievement was noted by his form teacher as, “Top out of a mediocre lot.  Reflects nothing of his ability, he’s slapdash, erratic and easy-going” to which my grandfather response after reading this assessment was, “That man know you!”) and when he should have gone to St Luke’s College to become a PE teacher he went into the RAF instead and eventually spent his war in Africa.  When he came back to this country he was in his twenties, his ‘college years’ gone.  He was one-year emergency trained as a teacher and he found himself a job.

     The differences between my father’s generation and my own are instructive.  My father’s brother was a Bren gun carrier who was ‘mopping up’ through Germany towards the end of the war: he didn’t talk much about his horrific experiences; my mother’s brother was deeply scarred by his experiences of being evacuated from France after Dunkirk, though towards the end of his life he was a witty raconteur about his absurd times in the army.  What did we Baby Boomers have to put beside this?  And what real threats had we had to contend with?

     I use an echo of the phrasing from a character in the BBC television series ‘Dad’s Army’ as the title for this poem because I wanted to bring in the sense of muddling unreality yet ultimate success that the series seemed to encapsulate, and I think that that attitude is now being applied to the virus: excitement tinged with pleasurable cinematic disaster-movie fear.

     The end of the poem asks a question.  To which I have no answer.

“Covid-19, Mr. Mainwaring, Sir!”

It crossed my mind

this virus is the war

we baby boomers

never had.

We missed conscription,

so, The War was second-hand

with scraps passed on

from first-hand sources in our homes.

Music, names and words and thoughts:

spivs, blackout, Vera Lynne, Dunkirk,

Black Market, Blitz, and rationing,

and mind my bike, put out the light!

No, that’s Othello, not a warden’s words.

And, that’s the point.

I went to college

at the age my dad went to the RAF.

Free milk before,

fees paid for then,

and job ahead

for we, we happy few –

and pension too.

But now, malign, omnivorous

(and our specific age group in its sights)

this virus comes to spoil the tale.

I once asked mum

if she had ever thought        

in darkest days of war

that we could face defeat?

“Not once!” she said.

Not once, in spite of all that

sleek, repulsive, Nazi chic

that seemed to ooze efficiency

against inept Dad’s Armoury!

Not once. 

A phrase of confidence and faith,

or blind delusion based on hope?

Or all of the above, and more?

And do I have to choose?