Two by Tessimond

(A.S.J. Tessimond 1902-62)

If men were not striped like tigers

How much simpler if men were not striped like tigers, patched like clowns,
If alternate white and black were not further confused by greys and browns,
If people were, even at times, consistent wholes,
If the actors were rigidly typed and kept their roles,
If we were able
To classify friends, each with his label,
Each label neat
As the names of cakes or categories of meat.
But you, my dear, are a greedy bitch, yet also a sad child lost,
And you who have swindled your partners are kind to the cat,
And, in human beings, this is not this nor that quite that
And the threads are crossed
And nothing's as tidy as the mind could wish
And the human mammal is partly insect and often reptile and also fish.

The birds of sorrow (translation from the French of Jacques Prevert, Les oiseaux du souci)

Rainfall of feathers feathers of falling rain
She who loved you will never come back again
What do you want of me birds
Feathers of falling rain oh rainfall of feathers
Now that my love won't come any more I don't know any more
I don't know where I'm going and nothing is plain
Rainfall of feathers feathers of falling rain
I don't know any longer what to do
Pall of black rain of rain that falls like pain
Can it be true that never again
Pall-black feathers … Away with you swallows be off now
Get out of your nests … What's that? Not time to start yet?
To hell with time get out of this room you swallows of morning
Swallows of evening go … Go where? No no it's I who'll go
Feathers of darkness darkness of feathers I'll go go nowhere anywhere go
So stay here birds of despair
Stay … make yourselves at home

To Anybody At All

I didn't want you cosy and neat and limited.
I didn't want you to be understandable,
Understood.
I wanted you to stay mad and limitless,
Neither bound to me nor bound to anyone else's or your own preconceived idea of yourself.

Margaret Tait (1918-1999)

I came across this in Antonia Fraser's anthology of Scottish verse. Ali Smith has written about Margaret Tait here.

Two London photos

Now playing - Nothing is in vain

Thinking of wonderful marimba music heard from afar last night.

Now listening to choral music by the Danish (?) composer Vagn Holmboe. Amongst others, there are settings of "The Wee Wee Man" and "A Lyke-Wake Dirge" ("This ae nicht, this ae nicht, every nicht and a', fire and fleet and candle-licht, and Christ receive thy soul.")

Intet er Forgaves (Nothing is in vain)

Nothing is in vain, all is you, o life.
Every hour given to me is just you, my life,
Nothing is wasted,
Nothing is erased,
Nothing leads me astray
Only home at last.

(Lagerqvist)

Belatedly, some photos from Fife

A visit to St Andrews earlier this month: but it took me some time to organise the photos. More photos in the badge to the right!

Disappointed

I had intended to post a picture here tonight but for various reasons have changed my mind.

Instead I have been reflecting on the nature of blogging. It seems to me that blogging should create a community which freely shares ideas and communications. For a fellow blogger to resort to issuing threats in order to suppress a legitimate posting is surely outside this spirit. Anyone who were to do so should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves. I am of course speaking purely hypothetically.

DIGIT@LL MULTIMEDIA SHOW

DIGIT@LL degree show for students graduating BSc (Hons) Multimedia Technology 2006

Ah, vita bella!

A concert by the sensational L'Arpeggiata at St John's, Smith Square. "Boleros, Fandangos and Ciacconas from the Old and New Worlds". A mixture of seventeenth-century Spanish and Italian music with improvisations and work by members of the group. Wonderfully exuberant: every performer a star: the singers Lucilla Galeazzi and Beatrice Mayo-Felip, and all the instrumentalists conveying their wild enthusiasm. It's being broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on 10th June: there are some downloads at L'Arpeggiata's website under downloads (try Galeazzi's Voglio un casa, but all the download tracks are wonderful!)

S'e fatta mezzanotte
ma notte scura scura,
s'e fatta mezzanotte
dorme la luna.
S'e fatta mezzanotte
ed era pieno giorno
di colpo mi si e spenta
la luce intorno.
S'e fatta mezzanotte
ed io non so perche.

Ti piacevano le salsicce
mo non le mangi piu
ti piacevano le ciliegie
mo non le mangi piu
ti piaceva fare l'amore
a tutte quante l'ore
Ah! Vita bella, perche non torni piu?

The joy of an iPod

The shuffle function on my iPod threw up this wonderful track "Not-very-long Song", which I had completely forgotten, from Howard Skempton's album of his accordion music Home and Abroad.


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One of the things I love about this short piece is that it reminds me of Skempton's choral Song of Songs setting, which repeats again and again the words "This is the Song of Songs, which is Solomon's". I heard it once in a memorable concert in Cambridge and wish someon would record it!

(And after many efforts when my internet connection failed at the critical moment, I have at last succeeded in uploading it. Bruce and the spider come to mind.)

Frustration

Trying to upload something to post, and my internet connection keeps being interrupted!

The joys of the digital age.

(And I can't sleep either.)

If there is no struggle there is no progress

A concert by COMA London Ensemble

Rzewski Spoils 1-9 (a world premiere). Rzewski uses the song "Johnny I hardly knew you" - which he'd used in a previous antiwar piece in 1972. "At that time I was thinking of the war in Vietnam. Now it has come back in another form." Then Peace March 2 by Christian Wolff, and entertaining pieces by Stephen Montague and Michael Finnissy. And finally Rzewski's Struggle song, setting words by Frederick Douglas, a 19th-century anti-slavery leader: "If there is no struggle there is no progress...Those who say they want freedom but don't like agitation are people who want crops without ploughing up the ground. They want rain without storms. They want the ocean without the awful roar of the swirling waters...We never get all we pay for but we pay for all we get..."

I'm afraid I wasn't in the mood. Music seems an inadequate response to the calamity in Iraq. We're in a world whose awfulness leaves us no way to begin to struggle.

When Wittgenstein decided to give away his money, he gave it not to the poor but to members of his family who were already so rich that they wouldn't be corrupted by his gift. It seems as appropriate as anything else.

Tutto nel mondo è burla.

The Angel of the North

Antony Gormley's enormous sculpture, snapped from the train this afternoon.

Opening the anthology at random

I wanted to read one poem before going to sleep...

CHOROS FROM MORPHEUS

Give me your poppies,
poppies. one by one,
red poppies,
white ones,
red ones set by white;
I'm through with protestation;
my delight
knows nothing of the mind
or argument;
let me be done
with brain's intricacies;
your insight
has drive deeper
than the lordliest tome
of Attic thought
or Cyrenian logic;
O strange, dark Morpheus,
covering me with wings,
you give the subtle fruit
Odysseus scorned
that left his townsmen fainting on the sands,
you bring the siren note,
the lotus-land;
O let me rest
at last,
at last,
at last;
your touch is sweeter
than the touch of Death;
O I am tired of measures
like deft oars;
the beat and ringing
of majestic song;
give me your poppies;
I would lie along
hot rocks, listening;
still my ambition
that would rear and chafe
like chariot horses
waiting for the race;
let me forget
the spears of Marathon.

H.D.

["H.D." was Hilda Doolittle (1886-1961)]

A concert

"New Quays" - pianist Ian Pace and performers from Trinity College of Music

To mention in particular:

The world premiere of Páramo de voces by the Mexican composer Hilda Paredes. A mixture of piano and electronics (the latter performed by the composer), the piano appearing sometimes to respond to the electronics and sometimes vice versa, the electronics seeming to react and to explore the resonances of the piano part (in fact, when I asked afterwards, the pianist was always fitting with the pre-recorded CD). An interesting sound-world: the composer said during the discussion that her "music itself makes the decisions about where to go: there is no need for libretto or text". The piece was inspired bywritings by Juan Rulfo: Paredes told us about this fascinating-sounding writer whose work is, I fear, inaccessible to non-Spanish-speakers like me.

An amazingly dense and complicatedpiece by Xenakis, played with enormous virtuosity.

Snow-Moon-Flowers by Peter Sculthorpe, miniatures played by Lara Griffin. Spare and evocative, exploring "how by moonlight sometimes flowers are snow and sometimes snow can be flowers" (my memory of how the piece was introduced).

Network Busy by Joseph Hood and Ayanna Witter-Johnson, in which the audience were invited to use their mobiles to call or text phones placed across the piano strings as the piece developed.

Listening is the refusal of habit
(Helmut Lachenmann, quoted by Ian Pace during the post-concert discussion)

From my window

Yes, my window does need cleaning!

A street corner in Lewisham (on my way home)

On the windowsill

We(s)t London

I've been thinking for the last couple of days (after reading something in someone else's blog) about this poem of Matthew Arnold's, and especially its setting by Ives with a long, evocative postlude which questions the optimism of the last line:

West London

Crouch'd on the pavement close by Belgrave Square
A tramp I saw, ill, moody, and tongue-tied;
A babe was in her arms, and at her side
A girl; their clothes were rags, their feet were bare.
Some labouring men, whose work lay somewhere there,
Pass'd opposite; she touch'd her girl, who hied
Across, and begg'd and came back satisfied.
The rich she had let pass with frozen stare.
Thought I: Above her state this spirit towers;
She will not ask of aliens, but of friends,
Of sharers in a common human fate.
She turns from that cold succour, which attends
The unknown little from the unknowing great,
And points us to a better time than ours.

and then this morning: Wet London

An old favourite

For some reason Marjory Fleming (1803-1811) came to mind tonight, the Scottish girl whose journals reveal a very intelligent child's take on the world she knew and an adult world she half understood, as well as a poet undaunted by the difficulties of the genre. A few samples:

Sonnet [to a pet monkey?]

O lovely O most charming pug
Thy gracefull air & heavenly mug
The beauties of his mind do shine
And every bit is shaped so fine
Your very tail is most devine
Your teeth is whiter than the snow
You are a great buck and a bow
Your eyes are of so fine a shape
More like a christains then an ape
His cheeks is like the roses blume
Your hair is like the ravens plume
His noses cast is of the roman
He is a very pretty weomen
I could not get a rhyme for roman
And was oblidged to call it weoman

I am now going to tell you about the horible and wretched plaege that my multiplication gives me you cant concieve it - the most Devilis thing is 8 times 8 & 7 times 7 it is what nature itselfe cant endure.

The balmy brease comes down from heaven
And makes us like for to be liveing
But when we think that if we died
No pleaure there would be denied
There happiness doth always reign
And there we feel not a bit pain
In the morning the first thing I see
is most beautiful trees spreading their
luxuriant branches between the Horizon & me

I love in Isas bed to lie
O such a joy & luxury
The bottom of the bed I sleep
And with great care I myself keep
Oft I embrace her feet of lillys
But she has goton all the pillies
Her neck I never can embrace
But I do hug her feet in place
But I am sure I am contented
And of my follies am repented
I am sure I'd rather be
In a smal bed at liberty

Evening on the seafront

Sea Horizon Sky

blue ! blue and wispy white

time passes

blue ! blue

blue blue

blue

time passes

grey

time passes

black

One of Hopkins

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying What I do is me: for that I came.

I say more: the just man justices;
Kéeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is -
Chríst - for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

This was the first poem of Hopkins that I discovered, and he was the first poet I discovered for myself, rather than in a schoolbook.