The Holy Family

by Poussin. The tree on the left is an orange tree, which blossoms and fruits at the same time, a symbol of fertility and blossoming purity, represented ideally in the Virgin Mary.

Employment

He that is weary, let him sit.
My soul would stir
And trade in courtesies and wit,
Quitting the fur
To cold complexions needing it.

Man is no star, but a quick coal
Of mortal fire:
Who blows it not, nor doth control
A faint desire,
Lets his own ashes choke his soul.

When th' elements did for place contest
With him, whose will
Ordain'd the highest to be best;
The earth sat still,
And by the others is opressed.

Life is a business, not good cheer;
Ever in wars.
The sun still shineth there or here,
Whereas the stars
Watch an advantage to appear.

O that I were an Orange-tree,
That busy plant!
Then should I ever laden be,
And never want
Some fruit for him that dressed me.

But we are still too young or old;
The man is gone,
Before we do our wares unfold:
So we freeze on,
Until the grave increase our cold.

George Herbert, 1633

Herbert's weariest poem. The brash confidence of the opening verse is trodden down as the poem progresses till it stops dead in the frozen earth. Life is a business, or "Life is Business", as our modern ears naturally hear it, although the use of "business" to mean specifically commercial transactions does not predate the 18th century, according to the OED, and that makes obvious historical sense. It was used in Herbert's time to refer to a person's occupation or daily activity, and that might include buying and selling. However prior to the 17th century, "business" seems also to have meant "anxiety" or "source of anxiety and concern", and this sense has perhaps survived in expressions like "it's a bad business..." or "what a terrible business!" (Expressions reminiscent of an Edwardian period drama - a murder-mystery probably - but perhaps people still use them.) That sense of "business" is the earliest cited in the OED, from 950, translated in the source as the Latin solicitudinem, but by the 17th century it seems to have to have been used in a more neutral sense: serious occupation or public affairs, as opposed to having a good time, or "cheer".

Whereas the stars/Watch an advantage to appear... again, one thinks of business in the modern sense, and in fact a sense of "advantage" as commercial advantage, or "pecuniary profit" was active in the 17th century. "Another fleet... had fallen upon the Molucca islands, bringing away great advantage" (Grotius's Low-Countrey Warrs, 1665, cited in the OED)

Festive erotic screenshots

from Mario Banana 1

from Emanuelle in America

from Throw Away Your Books, Let's Go Into the Streets

Art and Engagement

I heard Harold Pinter on the radio this evening describing the necessary antagonism that theatre creates between artist and audience. Part of him despises the audience - and the audience more than reciprocate with their sadistic shuffling and coughing. But Pinter pointed out that the duty of the performers is to rise to that challenge, to meet the audience in combat and overmaster them. Certainly, it is not good to flatter them, to offer to "entertain" them. Part of the viewer is resentful of art, and jealous of its self-containment; a part of the artist wishes to twist the viewer's hand right back until it hurts. What fun! The concept of the fight, or the engagement, kicks through the "entertainment" lie and allows people to verbalise their anger when confronted by genuine art. That's good for the artist too, who should never be flattered. It's dispiriting for flatterers to hear that an artist is irritated and made uncomfortable by praise; what artists long for is a passionately-felt attack on their work, a proof that their play or their film has wounded the heart of a sensitive critic.

And my thought all gone & the vanish of the sun

I think one can only capture The Dream Songs' lurches in tone if one reads them while half-drunk. Berryman does extraordinary violence to the language, dismembers his sentences with a theatrical wave of the knife. And in their stumbling and their turning bewildered back on themselves, his poems are already remorseful, conveying a distinctive self-conscious pathos.

The surly cop lookt out at me in sleep
insect-like. Guess, who was the insect.
I'd asked him in my robe
& hospital gown in the elevator politely
why someone saw so many police around,
and without speaking he looked.

A meathead, and of course he was armed, to creep
across my nervous system some time ago wrecked.
I saw the point of Loeb
at last, to give oneself over to crime wholly,
baffle, torment, roar laughter, or without sound
attend while he is cooked

until with trembling hands hoist I my true
& legal ax, to get at the brains. I never liked brains -
it's the texture & the thought -
but I will like them now, spooning at you,
my guardian, slowly, until at length the rains
lose heart and the sun flames out.

Dream Song 95, by John Berryman

Richard Loeb, along with his accomplice Nathan Leopold, became famous in the 1920s after murdering a 14 year-old boy with a chisel in an attempt to do something "Nietzschean". He was himself only 18 at the time, and the product of a respectable middle-class family. He was later killed in gaol by another inmate. The two friends were the inspiration for Rope.

Tea Rose Hybrid

Blank limits of Art

photo by Daido Moriyama

I was once invited outside for a fight by a fan of the Dead Kennedys for suggesting that the song Police Truck might be interpreted as pro-police. It documents a scene of police brutality accompanied by a pruriently righteous guitar part. It's an early song, and the Kennedys themselves evolved a more politically constructive lyrical and musical style. From the leering aggression of Saturday Night Holocaust to the fair-minded suggestions of Stars and Stripes of Corruption ("How about more art and theatre instead of sports?") the Dead Kennedys certainly made a rational political journey. But the music was somehow neutered, and everyone prefers the early work, rage and moral nihilism notwithstanding. The Kennedys ran up against the limitations of punk, of a restricted aesthetic. Unprepared to burst their musical boundaries, they gave up the ghost and disbanded. They had no tools to advance their style without diluting it. Kurt Cobain's suicide I interpret as a musical admission of defeat, among other things. There was nowhere else for Nirvana to go without abandoning the Seattle sound entirely. Despite his political engagement, he ended up trapped in his aesthetic graveyard; improvising freely at the end of a performance, "did you really pay to listen to this shit?" he asked the audience. But by decisively abndoning his fans and truly investigating the "shit" they resented, he might have saved his art.

Perhaps there is no rational political future. Perhaps there is only continued existence and grey variations of more of the same. The films of Lucio Fulci convey this philosophy with open-eyed horror. The drab grey hell of The Beyond is a symbolic representation of the non-possibility of any fundamental change in economic or social relations. Beyond this world, suggests Fulci, is a pale waste inhabited by homeless alcoholics. We are condemned, in this world and the next, merely to feed and to wander. His hero and heroine, abruptly transfered to the afterlife, find they have become blind. There will be no redemption or change. Fulci himself, as a Catholic and an anti-fascist, shrank from the horror of this, but despite himself he was unable to film happy endings.

If religion provides only illusory comfort, and if Marxism too is an illusion, if there is no religious or secular hope, one ends, in Art, with the repetitive and destructive emptiness depicted by Fulci, or the weary estrangement of this poem by Kipling, one of his Epitaphs of the War:

SALONIKAN GRAVE

I have watched a thousand days
Push out and crawl into night
Slowly as tortoises.
Now I, too, follow these.
It is fever, and not the fight -
Time, not battle - that slays.

Rudyard Kipling

Kim Longinotto, the truth, and the human

I've just come back from a screening of the documentary Sisters in Law, by Kim Longinotto, who also directed Divorce Iranian Style. Both are filmed without commentary, and follow the stories of various women trying to seek justice for themselves within a traditional legal system. Sisters in Law was filmed in Cameroon with Florence Ayisi, and follows a number of cases - for example that of a Muslim woman called Amina, who succesfully prosecutes and divorces her husband for beating and abusing her. She was the first woman to obtain such a prosecution in her area, and she was helped by a group of Cameroonian women lawyers, prosecutors and activists. It would be fatuous to call the film inspiring, since the stories were so sad and the lives they described were so harsh, and, besides, the fight belongs to them and not to well-meaning observers. But the film concluded with the first Cameroonian woman judge introducing Amina to her legal students - most of them women - and showing to them by inspiring example, how a brave stand by a single individual could force society to change.

Kim Longinotto was present at the screening to answer questions at the end. One criticism raised was that as a Western woman filming the proceedings, she was inevitably going to be intervening herself in the world that she films, and that she couldn't pretend to be some kind of 'neutral observer'. Longinotto readily conceded this, and made quite clear that she was engaged, as a film maker, in the struggles she documented. Amina was apparently very keen for her case to be filmed, and this was clearly, in part, in order to exert pressure on the judges, who would be conscious that their decision would be made "in the eyes of the world". On the other hand, it is strange, remarked Kim Longinotto, how soon people forget that the camera is present, and Amina, on returning home from court, was asked "Were there any other women there with you?", and she replied, quite unselfconsciously, "No! Only me!" It's interesting in that respect that Longinotto uses quite a large camera, and avoids using hidden cameras, and this may paradoxically result in more natural behaviour.

The film was made without commentary, and Longinotto was also criticised for this, for not contextualising the society which she filmed... "What is the ratio of Muslims to Christians in Cameroon?" "What are the various language and ethnic divisions?" But, in truth, no amount of contextual facts will force the viewer to perceive another society with a humane sensibility. Longinotto changes the world through her films by first altering bare perceptions, by appealing to conscience. And it is only on such a base that facts have much relevance or use. I saw Divorce Iranian Style in 1998 and it was the first time I had ever seen Iranians outside the Death to America pantomimes or war reporting. And any slight knowledge I have of Iran, based on books like Roy Mottahadeh's The Mantle of the Prophet, was founded on the first shock of human recognition. Talk of airstrikes on Iran with nuclear-tipped warheads is absolutely dependent on people never seeing films like Divorce Iranian Style, or Longinotto's other Iranian documentary Runaway. One of the most popular Iranian films in recent years was a satire on the clergy, called The Lizard. It has great popular appeal, but it was only ever shown in the UK at the ICA as far as I'm aware and is only commercially available on a wretched bootleg from iranian.com. When Iranian graphic artist Marjane Satrapi visited Utah to give a reading, someone asked her "Can you see the moon from Iran?" Artists like Longinotto and Satrapi have to build on a surface of almost complete ignorance, but the question is actually a rather sweetly poetic one - and the questioner at least had the interest to attend a talk by Satrapi. When al-Jazeera interviewed Israeli politicians, I believe it was the first time many in the region had heard an Israeli speak. There are actually very few Israeli films released in the West; while its news profile is very high, its cultural - its human - profile is almost non-existent. And if that is true in the West, it is probably all the more true in the Arab world. It helps aid the process of demonization. "Where are your horns?", my Israeli colleague was asked.

Longinotto prefers to film in medium shots, avoiding close-ups, rapid cutting or ostentatious camera-work. It is a very modest, unobtrusive style. That may in part be the reason for the immense emotional power of her work. Her films almost always bring tears to the eyes, tears of longing and of shame on the part of the viewer, not so much the smug tears of empathy. It is the longing to make a connection, to reach out an authentic hand. And the means by which Longinotto consistently achieves this is mysterious. To me, it is an alchemy produced by her engagement, by the value her art places on justice and truth. The greatest art is a moral challenge to the viewer and is itself the product of a moral sensibility. The alternative is amusing, but does no more than fiddle at the burning. I was reminded, watching Sisters in Law and listening to Longinotto, of Peter Watkins, of Culloden and Punishment Park ....and also of Paul Morrissey and Andy Warhol.

Morrissey is quoted in Bob Colacello's memoir and biography of Warhol, Holy Terror, as saying to him, "I mean, what could be more ridiculous than the pompous, pseudointellectual notion that the director is the most important person on a movie? Everyone knows the most important person on a movie is the star!" Morrissey, Longinotto and Watkins are united by their determination to efface themselves as artists before what they film, for their moral commitment, unsparing and hostile to compromise, and by the mysterious power of their work, bestowed like a blessing upon the righteous, and impossible to fake or imitate. Aleister Crowley wrote in Liber AL vel Legis, "Every man and every woman is a star", and between the starry potential envisaged by Crowley and the grimy, abject starriness of a Morrissey subject, are the figures of Amina in Sisters in Law, or the little girl taking the place of her clerical father in Divorce Iranian Style, and dispensing satirical justice from his chair. They are stars, and Longinotto their committed observer.

The BrightLights Film Journal has an overview of Longinotto's work here

And Red Pepper has a very brief interview

A puzzle to hunters

So wary as to disappear for centuries and reappear,
yet never to be caught,
the unicorn has been preserved
by an unmatched device
wrought like the work of expert blacksmiths -
this animal of that one horn
throwing itself upon which headforemost from a cliff,
it walks away unharmed;
proficient in this feat which, like Herodotus,
I have not seen except in pictures.
Thus this strange animal with its miraculous elusiveness,
has come to be unique,
"impossible to take alive,"
tamed only by a lady inoffensive like itself -
as curiously wild and gentle;
"as straight and slender as the crest,
or antlet of the one-beam'd beast."
Upon the printed page,
also by word of mouth,
we have a record of it all
and how, unfearful of deceit,
etched like an equine monster of an old celestial map,
beside a cloud or dress of Virgin-Mary blue,
improved "all over slightly with shakes of Venice gold,
and silver, and some O's,"
the unicorn "with pavon high," approaches eagerly;
until engrossed by what appears of this strange enemy,
upon the map, "upon her lap,"
its "mild wild head doth lie."

from Sea Unicorns and Land Unicorns by Marianne Moore

Mimosa tree and flowers by Sosetsu (17th Century)

Sleeptree songs

Four poems from Heian Japan

from Lady Ki to Otomo no Yakamochi, with a sleeptree flower and some reed blossoms...

For you, my slave,
I picked these reed blossoms
From the fields of spring
With my own hands.
Eat them and grow fat.

Should the mistress alone
See the sleeptree,
That opens in the day
And sleeps in love at night?
Look upon it too, slave.

He replies:

This slave must be longing
For his mistress -
Though I eat the buds of reed you send,
I grow but thinner, thinner.

The sleeptree you sent, love,
That I might think of you,
Will only bear flowers,
Never bear fruit.

Lady Ki was older than Yakamochi and the wife of an imperial prince, while Yakamochi (718 - 785) was a lower ranking courtier. The sleeptree is the mimosa, which folds up its leaves and "sleeps" at night. Its name, nebu or nemu, sounds like the word for sleep, and the characters with which it is written have erotic connotations, "untie pleasure".

from A Warbler's Song in the Dusk - The Life & Work of Otomo Yakamochi by Paula Doe

from The Story of a Glove by Max Klinger

Elm

for Ruth Fainlight

I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root;
It is what you fear.
I do not fear it: I have been there.

Is it the sea you hear in me,
Its dissatisfactions?
Or the voice of nothing, that was your madness?

Love is a shadow.
How you lie and cry after it.
Listen: these are its hooves: it has gone off, like a horse.

All night I shall gallop thus, impetuously,
Till your head is a stone, your pillow a little turf,
Echoing, echoing.

Or shall I bring you the sound of poisons?
This is rain now, the big hush.
And this is the fruit of it: tin white, like arsenic.

I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets.
Scorched to the root
My red filaments burn and stand, a hand of wires.

Now I break up in pieces that fly about like clubs.
A wind of such violence
Will tolerate no bystanding: I must shriek.

The moon, also, is merciless: she would drag me
Cruelly, being barren.
Her radience scathes me. Or perhaps I have caught her.

I let her go. I let her go
Diminshed and flat, as after radical surgery.
How your bad dreams possess and endow me.

I am inhabited by a cry.
Nightly it flaps out
Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.

I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me;
All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.

Clouds pass and disperse.
Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables?
Is it for such I agitate my heart?

I am incapable of more knowledge.
What is this, this face
So murderous in its strangle of branches?--

Its snaky acids kiss.
It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults
That kill, that kill, that kill.

Sylvia Plath

Ectoplasm

Ectoplasmic faces produced in the course of a séance

Pity the monsters

Charles Ogle as Frankenstein (1910)

CGI is the death of theatre, yawn.

There is a scene in Cannibal Holocaust where the Shamatari (one of the three featured "cannibal" tribes) are grotesquely murdering some captured Yanomamo. Two men are dragging what looks like a stone axe wrapped with cloth up and down a girl's chest. Why are they doing that? They may be tenderising the meat in some way, but it's hard to be sure. The 'effect' as such is not particularly convincing, but neither are most of the others in the film. For some reason, it doesn't seem to matter. Most viewers don't seem to notice - not even the wig falling off the 'severed head' of Faye in the final massacre. So what power does Cannibal Holocaust possess? Does it have this power in spite of its bad effects, or partly because of them? The scene with the Shamatari is highly theatrical; it is a staged vision of hell. And the means that it uses are theatrical means.

Peter Hall, in an essay comparing the cinema to the stage, wrote that the miracle of theatre was that with a few bare boards and some simple props, one could create a world, a world that the audience would enter, and that would be completely real to them. Whereas in the cinema - one duff effect and the spell is broken, the magic is ruined! But perhaps this is a distinction between different kinds of film, as much as between theatre and cinema. Some directors are, after all, extremely theatrical. John Waters is a good example. The pantomime sets of Desperate Living are entirely convincing, albeit made out of scavenged trash and cardboard. Mortville is as real as if I saw it on the TV - maybe more so. The limitations of certain films - the technical limitations they have in terms of presenting the 'real' - signal to the audience that what they are watching is not merely real. What they are watching is not therefore a failure, but something with artistic intention like a play or a poem. Something, therefore, with artistic power. In a performance of Titus Andronicus, and I think too, in one of Sarah Kane's plays, blood was symbolised pouring from the wounds of the characters by using long red streamers. And yet the audience were still shocked and traumatised - perhaps all the more so. Imagine Cannibal Holocaust with FX by Tom Savini. It would be a film drained of its improvisatory, theatrical imagination, and hence most of its artistic authority. The best thing about the zombies in a Romero film is their simple grey make up with well-perfused fingers and eyelids. Night of the Living Dead in particular gains in power from the cheap effects. The worst thing is the realistic entrails, the slop and the showpiece dismemberments that do nothing to save or elevate Day of the Dead. They are too convincing - mere technical achievements. The audience look on with indifference.

Having said that, I don't mean to imply that a 'theatrical' effect is a bad one - only, that it will not be a seamless one, that it never aims at superrealist precision. The effects themselves will be all the more imaginative - but using the kind of simple stage tricks seen in Ringu, for example, when Sadako crawls from the TV set. Not difficult to work out how they did that! But it was a scene that drove a nail into the audience. It shouldn't be difficult to work out how they impaled the girl in Cannibal Holocaust, but even Italian judges and British customs officials were convinced it had 'actually happened'. It's not because these sort of people are stupid - as some would have us believe - and not because a more elaborate effect would have had some give-away CGI sheen, but because the bare-bones theatrical techniques signal the presence of an artistic as opposed to a technical vision, and have the most artistic power. And it is the heart of Cannibal Holocaust that people find so disturbing.

... the metaphysical side of bad dreams

"This may seem strange, but I am happier than someone like Bunuel, who says he is looking for God. I have found him in the misery of others, and my torment is greater than Bunuel's. For I have realised that God is a God of suffering. I envy atheists; They don't have all these difficulties."

Lucio Fulci

Iron Rose

sweet, portentous lust - from Jean Rollin's "Rose de Fer"

Sometimes, when I necked with a stranger, I went
close to that - pheromone, sweat,
scorch, kiss of life - tasting in him
some male, unmothered world, and through him
a male world was tasting me.
Every time, I was pretending, without knowing,
that I could lay my body like a soul in his hands
and he would not take it. But he might. But he would not.

Sharon Olds

Mictlantecuhtli

Mexican God of death

"The unwanted unwanting the world"

THERE IS NO RIOT

Even that desperate gaiety is gone.
Empty bottles, no longer trophies
are weapons now. Even the cunning
grumble. "If is talk you want," she said,
"you wasting time with me. Try the church."
One time, it was because rain fell
there was no riot. Another time
it was because the terrorist forgot
to bring the bomb. Now, in these days
though no rain falls, and bombs are well remembered
there is no riot. But everywhere
empty and broken bottles gleam like ruin.


O MY COMPANION

This afternoon white sea-birds
were quiet, very quiet, until
a cloud over the sun fooled them
it was sunset. The fishes laughed
at the hook in the bait. The cork danced.

Where you are, I am. Lost and seeking
I question the waste. The wind
is blue smoke. From the fires
no flame sprouts. In the distance
day is a foreigner. If a child drowns
it is the sky's fault. If sea-birds stray
the sun's. O my companion.


FOR WALTER RODNEY

Assassins of conversation
they bury the voice
they assassinate, in the beloved
grave of the voice, never to be silent.
I sit in the presence of rain
in the sky's wild noise
of the feet of some who
not only, but also, kill
the origin of rain, the ankle
of the whore, as fastidious
as the great fight, the wife
of water. Risker, risk.
I intend to turn a sky
of tears, for you.

from Selected Poems by Martin Carter (1927 - 1997)

Caileag spioradail às an t-Seapan

photo by Nobuyoshi Araki

Another Japanese tale of horror

PART ONE

There was once a girl of middling appearance and marriageable age who lived in a remote house with her parents. She used to sell candies in the nearest village. She would push round a wooden cart and the neighbourhood children would scramble up to it. The cart was a rather dilapidated one, but she made it attractive with bright coloured cloths. When the candies were sold, and her work finished for the day, she would walk the few miles back home. To anyone watching her as she made her way, it might seem that she was thinking. Not merely daydreaming, or turning things over in the everyday sense, but actively, furiously thinking. An onlooker might be reminded of ants, or of a cloud of mosquitos. There was something rather disturbing about it.
She had much the same manner at dinner, but her parents were used to it. As soon has she had finished, she marched out rather stiffly to her bedroom, and took out an old book with many hundreds of blank pages. This was her diary, and every night without fail she would fill out a page with whatever it was that she wrote - because no one to this day has any idea what she did write, or what it was that so troubled and preoccupied her. Her father had little interest in his daughter, and it would never have occured to him to read it, and her mother, with whom she made the candies each morning, had never learned to read or write.

An elderly man trudged his way up to the remote house one evening. From her room the girl could hear the old man and her father talking. Not unnaturally, in the course of her work in the village, she had attracted a number of admirers, and not just among the children. What was taking place that night, as her mother knelt by the table pouring saké, was a negotiation. And sure enough, when she arrived home the following evening and greeted her parents, her father informed her that she was going to be married, to a young farmer in the nearby village. He had noticed her as she lifted the cloth from the sweets on her cart, surrounded by a press of excited children, and he had watched her from a distance as she pushed her cart home, her head bent, and her long hair blown by the wind into tangles.
And that night, as every night, the girl wrote her diary, in lines now graceful and flowing, now jagged and broken.
She remembered him, vaguely. He had a yearning expression. He was the heir to a reasonable-sized farm and a substantial, if rather characterless, farmhouse. The wedding would take place in a matter of months, and now, whenever she wheeled her sweet-cart into the village, she avoided looking around at the houses and surrounded herself with the children.
It was around this time that her diary-activity became more intense and concentrated. Each night she would stay up until the early hours, straining her eyes at the pages.
Eventually the day came when she was to be married, and the night when she would be accompanied back to his farm by her husband, and the morning when she would have get up before sunrise, before even the birds, and set out her husband's clean clothes and prepare his breakfast. Each day would be like that, stretching out monotonously until what seemed like infinity, but her consolation, and her curse, was that each night she retired to their bedroom before him, writing and writing with intense concentration.
She refused to show her husband what she was writing, and indeed to say anything meaningful about what she was putting in her diary. She would glower at him horribly if he so much as approached it. For the first few months of his marriage, he was happy to humour her in this, and he did not treat it as an insult. He had been lonely a long time, and had long found her fascinating. He was glad to be married, and to have his food prepared for him. He felt grateful to heaven. And yet, as the months went by, the couple began to chafe against each another. He found her secretive devotion to the heavy book troubling, exasperating, and finally disgusting.
One afternoon as she walked into the village to buy provisions, he opened the cupboard in which she kept it, carefully, slowly removed it, and stared at its dark cover, challenging himself to open it. It was absurd, he felt, that he should even feel nervous about it. It was a hundred times-over his right as a husband to open the pages and discover for himself what she was writing. And at that moment the room became grey as a cloud crossed the sun, and a strange chill came over him.

to be continued...

お化けのせかい

painting by さとし

A lonely ghost story from Japan

There was once a young man wandering by himself in the sun-dappled forest. He carried a bow in his hand and a quiver on his shoulder but he was not interested in hunting. He was absorbed in thinking. But not thinking anything in particular. It was one of those days when his thoughts seemed to weigh rather heavily on him, although if asked he could never say exactly what the trouble was.
Passing beneath a group of shady trees, he took a path that he did not remember noticing before, and emerged after a while into a large and beautiful clearing. In the middle of the clearing was what looked like a hunting lodge, built of wood, with shuttered windows and a wooden balcony at the front. There didn't seem to be anyone about. He called, but there was no reply. Deciding to take a closer look, he stepped up onto the balcony and approached the door, pressing his hand against it. At once it glided open and he saw the brightly shining face of a beautiful woman.
"How very strange to see you", she said. "I hardly see anybody. I live a very secluded life here in the forest". The young man was too shocked to speak. "But since you're here", she continued, "come in anyway, and I'll boil you up some tea".
The hallway led directly through to what looked like a kitchen. On either side were two plain wooden doors. She opened the door on the right and led the young man through into a sitting room. It was sparsely furnished with a low table and an old wooden chest. There were also a number of birds fluttering restlessly in little cages. She dropped some seeds into each before going to the kitchen, returning with a small pot of tea.
They talked for a long while and the conversation flowed naturally from the first, although it was hard to say exactly what it was they talked about. The young man simply had the feeling of time passing by delightfully. As the afternoon wore on, however, and he noticed the rays of the declining sun through the shutters, he said "I must have kept you for hours. Perhaps I ought to be making my way back".
"Oh no", she replied, "I was hoping you might stay to dinner. But there was something I was wondering if you could do for me".
"Anything", he said.
"I was hoping you could mind the lodge while I'm gone. I need to go away for a short while. I won't be long". She stood up and led him into the hallway. "Make yourself at home in the sitting room", she said, "or wander through into the kitchen. But there's one thing I want you to promise me".
"What's that?"
"That you won't.... You can go into any room in the lodge - but don't open this door". And she pointed to the door on the left.
"But why on earth not?" he asked, surprised.
"Because you mustn't", she replied. "I want you to promise me faithfully that you will not".
"Then I will not. Of course. Absolutely" the young man said.
She smiled and turned to leave. She had an eerily beautiful face. Stepping down onto the balcony, she walked towards the forest and was gone.
Of course the young man found this curious, and after returning to the sitting room and thinking about her beauty for a while, he began to feel strangely ill at ease. He walked back to the hallway and stood before the left hand door. It was a plain wooden door with nothing interesting about it. Nonetheless its very blankness seemed provoking. What could lie beyond it?
He had promised very faithfully not to go inside, and a promise was a promise, especially one made to such a beautiful woman. But suddenly the thought of her beauty crossed his mind like a shadow, and almost angered him. The feeling passed, and he returned to the sitting room to peer at the birds and set them aflutter by tapping their cages.
But after some minutes he returned to the hallway and stared outside. There was no sign of her returning. The left hand door caught his attention. Without thinking he placed his fingers on the handle. He snatched them away, but then slowly returned them. It was only a door after all, and he was naturally curious.
He thought of her beauty, and somewhere in his mind he felt a stab of hatred. She would never know, and he would certainly not admit it. That wouldn't stop them having a beautiful dinner that night, and him paying her elaborate compliments.
He looked outside. Again, there was no sign of her. After pausing for a while, he turned the handle.
He pushed open the door, and stepped inside.

The room was empty. He looked around - it was completely bare. Yet at the corner of his eye he caught a strange glimpse of feathers. At the edges of his hearing he had a vague sense of the fluttering of wings, and then everything seemed to vanish from around him.
He woke up to find himself lying face down and alone in a deserted field. It seemed to be the following morning. He wiped the dew from his clothes as he picked himself up. The woman, the lodge and the beautiful clearing had all disappeared, although the field he recognised. It was not far from his home. What had he done when he opened that door? And what had become of the woman? He went back in his mind over everything that had happened. He recalled it all quite clearly, and felt desolate.
And for many months afterwards he would search through the forest and try to find that shady path to the clearing. He never stopped thinking of the little wooden lodge and the beautiful woman.
He never found either again.

Nagasaki

photo by Tomatsu Shomei

At this point in time, millions of souls collect
to say McTeague's gilt tooth should not have been taken away
& other American tragedies
imaginary & real: Hart Crane in Paris, wreckt,
Adlai in London, looking on a day
for a terrible partner, a tease.

O yes, at this point in time the American soul
gathers its forces for the good of man
but it has memories.
Henry Adams denied this, & he was right
but for the few the place is crawling with ghosts
like lice in a pan.

When will the fire be turned on? and by whom?
heating the memory and soul alike
until both crisp.
Not soon, I wonder, but in some lead-shielded room
mistakes are being made like the Third Reich
perhaps, I lisp.

John Berryman, 4th July 1968

Ròs buidhe

A flower for Nasrin Alavi, whose fascinating book We are Iran has just been published by Portobello Books. It is a compilation of articles on every imaginable subject by alert and courageous Iranian bloggers, interspersed with Alavi's analysis. It is a door into a world the Western reader might never imagine existed - over 64,000 blogs written in Persian!

"Reading We Are Iran, you have the sense that, for more reasons than are obvious, the worst thing that could possibly happen to Iran now would be US intervention."

Buy it here

Nasrin Alavi comments on Ahmadinejad and his recent speech in a letter to Christopher Dickey at his Shadowland Journal blog.

photo by Boris Mikhailov

A Farewell Thing While Breathing

a farewell thing while breathing
was walking down the hall
in underwear
with painted face like clown
a bomb from Cologne in right pocket
a SEASON IN HELL
in the left,
stripes of sunset
like
bass
running
down
his
arms,
and they found him in the morning
dangling in the fire escape
window,
face frosted and gone as an electric bulb,
and the sparrows
were in the brush downstairs,
and
friend,
sparrows do not sing
they emit sound,
and
they emitted sound,
and they
(the people, not the sparrows)
carried him down the steps
like a wasted owl.

Charles Bukowski

Kurutta ippeiji

from Beloved

"You could stay the night, Paul D."
"You don't sound too steady in the offer."
Sethe glanced beyond his shoulder toward the closed door. "Oh it's truly meant. I just hope you'll pardon my house. Come on in. Talk to Denver while I cook you something."
Paul D tied his shoes together, hung them over his shoulder and followed her through the door straight into a pool of red and undulating light that locked him where he stood.
"You got company?" he whispered, frowning.
"Of and on," said Sethe.
"Good God." He backed out the door onto the porch. "What kind of evil you got in here?"
"It's not evil, just sad. Come on. Just step through."

...

She was right. It was sad. Walking through it, a wave of grief soaked him so thoroughly he wanted to cry. It seemed a long way to the normal light surrounding the table, but he made it - dry-eyed and lucky.
"You said she died soft. Soft as cream," he reminded her.
"That's not Baby Suggs," she said.
"Who then?"
"My daughter. The one I sent ahead with the boys."
"She didn't live?"
"No. The one I was carrying when I run away is all I got left. Boys gone too. Both of em walked off just before Baby Suggs died."
Paul D looked at the spot where the grief had soaked him. The red was gone but a kind of weeping clung to the air where it had been.

Toni Morrison

Charles Bukowski (1920 - 1994)

My father

he carried a piece of
carbon, a blade and a whip
and at night he
feared his head
and covered it with blankets
until one morning in Los Angeles
it snowed
and I saw the snow
and I knew that my father
could control nothing,
and when
I got somewhat larger
and took my first boxcar
out, I sat there in
the lime
the burning lime
of having nothing
moving into the desert
for the first time
I sang.

from Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame

The Loss, The Loss, The Loss

the violets are waving like whores on a train out of
Norfolk,
Virginia was a nice lady who had nice
legs
but had to wear these
elastic plastic stockings because
of
bad veins due to a
Dutch greatgrandfather who
drank 12 quarts of beer a
day
and she died
when she
set herself on fire in the men's room of a
Pennsylvania eastbound
while smoking a Dutch Master in her (lower) lips
for $20
for 3 sweet boys from Harvard, really nice boys really
who wanted to photograph this
thing
where after the cigar the
3/4 jacked-off bulldog
in the wire suitcase (got on board through devious
means) was taught to leap in like
Normandy
like the waves off the coast of an
expensive resort
like
Joan of Arc
like your fingers holding mine
as the right-wing politician who wanted the presidency
and thinks atomic power is the chariot of Christ
cackles in his bloody sleep
of new life of man born in unfortunate places
and denied the final grace:
the social security of a
pisspot in a pisspot
day and
time.

from Penguin Modern Poets 13

Our investigating reporter

Joe d'Amato films have a reputation for sleaziness; they have a beady little eye for the right stone to lift up for bugs. I am a little suspicious of horror films which use suggestion, which prefer shadows and light-tricks to blunt presentation. As somebody's sensible grandmother said, "If it's there in the dark, it'll be just as much there when the light's on". Restraint can be a way of smugly avoiding the question, under the guise of artistic tact. D'Amato lets everything show, and if there is more banality on display than horror, so much the better. Or if there is horror, there it is, warm by your side; or it walks in and stands before you, matter-of-fact and indifferent. And the outrage and the pain come from you, they're not faked by the film; the films work, most often, very simply by switching all the lights on, and following things through to their logical conclusion. In Orgasmo Nero 2, d'Amato marks out a stretch of sand for a childish play, a horror-porn-environmental fable with the production values of a piece of street-theatre. A film completely without dignity. But a film made as if it were the last that were ever made, with no eye on posterity; regressing to childhood honesty, and doing merely what it wants to do, saying merely what it feels like saying, in the short time left to it.

from The Sugar-Cane

On festal days; or when their work is done;
Permit thy slaves to lead the choral dance,
To the wild banshaws melancholy sound.
Responsive to the sound, head, feet and frame
Move aukwardly harmonious; hand in hand
Now lock'd, the gay troop circularly wheels,
And frisks and capers with intemperate joy.
Halts the vast circle, all clap hands and sing;
While those distinguish'd for their heels and air,
Bound in the center, and fantastic twine.
Meanwhile some stripling, from the choral ring,
Trips forth; and, not ungallantly, bestows
On her who nimblest hath the greensward beat,
And whose flush'd beauties have inthrall'd his soul,
A silver token of his fond applause.
Anon they form in ranks; nor inexpert
A thousand tuneful intricacies weave,
Shaking their sable limbs; and oft a kiss
Steal from their partners; who, with neck reclin'd,
And semblant scorn, resent the ravish'd bliss.
But let not thou the drum their mirth inspire;
Nor vinous spirits: else, to madness fir'd,
(What will not bacchanalian frenzy dare?)
Fell acts of blood, and vengeance they pursue.

James Grainger (1724 - 67), a Scottish doctor and poet who moved in 1759 to St Kitts, where he wrote The Sugar-Cane, "a West India georgic", describing the soil, the climate and the management of slaves.

from The Penguin Book of Caribbean Verse in English, edited by Paula Burnett

A POSTER OF OUR DAZZLING VICTORY AT SAARBRUCKEN

In the centre of the poster, Napoleon
rides in apotheosis, sallow, medalled, a ramrod
perched on a merrygoround horse. He sees life
through rosy glasses, terrible as God,

and sentimental as a bourgeois papa.
Four little conscripts take their nap below
on scarlet guns and drums. One, unbuckling, cheers
Napoleon - he's stunned by the big name!

Another lounges on the butt of his Chassepot,
another feels his hair rise on his neck.
A bearskin shako bounds like a black sun.

VIVE L'EMPEREUR! They're holding back their breath.
And last, some moron, struggling to his knees,
presents a blue and scarlet ass - to what?

Rimbaud, translated by Robert Lowell

Emanuelle

The lamb of God

Francisco de Zurbaran (1598 - 1664)

The Parable of the Old Man and the Young

So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned both of them together,
Isaac the first borne spake and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb, for this burnt offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
And builded parapets and trenches there,
And stretchèd forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an Angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him, thy son.
Behold! Caught in a thicket by its horns,
A Ram. Offer the Ram of Pride instead.

But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.

Wilfred Owen (1893 - 1918)

A film by Peter Watkins

Punishment Park was, still is, criticised, held in contempt and derided for being 'hysterical', 'unrealistic' - "So, did any of that actually happen?" My God, I usually use 'righteous' as an insult, for those smugly confirmed in their own cause and enjoying the feeling it gives them, but this film is righteous like a prophet, its compassionate scream too piercing to be heard. Let's face it, most people identify with the 'tribunal'. Or no, but... To call this film 'hysterical' replicates exactly the charges made by members of the 'tribunal' against the young people before them. By polarising audiences so completely, Punishment Park draws out the same tensions among the viewing public that it portrays - when criticism of it is so vehement, how laughable to accuse this film of naive exageration and political crudity. The American flag flies at the beginning of the film reversed, as in a mirror. Why should righteous truth be sugar-coated every damn time for the idle consumer? The truth remains the truth, especially if it is the artistic truth, and it is not up some elitist mountain, but right there before us. Here's a stupid title for a book: Everything you know is wrong. And here's another one: You are being lied to. Goddamned commodified rebellion! The answer - as Punishment Park shouts over and over again while finding itself (to its visible distress and anger) almost completely inaudible - is, if you want to cut through the crap, look around you! - it's here, not somewhere hypothetical! And if anyone's telling lies around here, it's us telling lies to ourselves.

Punishment Park lasted four days on its release in the United States, before the distributors withdrew it. "Lack of customer interest". Too right! What self-respecting customer would want to sit through that for 88 minutes, and get harried, and mauled, and upset? Well, in Brighton, England, at any rate, it played for one 6 o'clock showing on one screen on one day; it raised its pitiful, sincere head, to the indifference which is the lot of every prophet. Who could blame Peter Watkins, the director, with all his immense technical fluency and facility, from giving up at this point, and starting to sweet-talk his audience? He never has. Because the audience never deserve to be sweet-talked, ever, by anything that aspires to be Art, not because the audience are unworthy of Art, but because real Art tries to convey the truth more than it thirsts for the next round of applause. "If Christ was on the earth today, people wouldn't even crucify him. They'd invite him to dinner-parties and laugh at him". I can't remember who wrote that.

But it's not apt. How sweet, how secure our lives are, if Punishment Park can be accused of 'hysteria', when young men are deported to Guantanamo Bay with less cause than brought the young people in this film before a fictional tribunal, and when the forces of liberation in Iraq have shown even less regard for the lives of their charges than that shown by some 'caricature' goons in a film.

Punishment Park is a bright flame of creative truth. I just wanted to say that.

Koré

As I was walking
I came upon
chance walking
the same road upon.
As I sat down
by chance to move
later
if and as I might

light the wood was,
light and green,
and what I saw
before I had not seen.

It was a lady
accompanied
by goat men
leading her.

Her hair held earth.
Her eyes were dark.
A double flute
made her move.

'Oh love,
where are you
leading
me now?'

Robert Creeley

A Bad Morning

The silver poplar, a beauty of local fame
An old hag today. The lake
A puddle of dirty suds - do not touch:
The fuschia among the snap dragons cheap and vain.

But why?
Last night in a dream I saw fingers pointing at me
As at a leper. They were callous, stained with work and
They were broken.

You don't know! I cried,
Conscious of guilt.

Bertoldt Brecht

I remember

It was my bridal night I remember,
An old man of seventy-three
I lay with my young bride in my arms,
A girl with t.b.
It was wartime, and overhead
The Germans were making a particularly heavy raid on Hampstead.
What rendered the confusion worse, perversely
Our bombers had chosen that moment to set out for Germany.
Harry, do they ever collide?
I do not think it has ever happened,
Oh my bride, my bride.

Stevie Smith

Mischief

'Oh,' he said, 'I have lived with nothingness
so long it has lost its meaning.
I have said "yes" to the universe
so many times its echoes
have returned increasingly as "no".
I have developed my negatives
of the divine and preserved their technicolour
in a make believe album. I realise
the imagination is alive only
in an oxygenated world. The truth
is less breath-taking than the vacuum
into which it withdraws. But against
all this I have seen the lamb
gambolling for a moment, as though
life were a good thing. This, I have said,
is God's roguery, juggling
with the scales, weighting the one
pan down with evil piled
upon evil then sending it suddenly
sky-high with in the other a tear
fallen from the hardest of eyes.

R. S. Thomas (1913 - 2000)

It was like a fine, bloody thread being pulled through their hearts

Who are you?

The spider clamps the bluefly - whose death panic
Becomes sudden soulful absorption.

A stoat throbs at the nape of the lumped rabbit
Who watches the skylines fixedly.

Photographs of people - open-mouthed
In the gust of being shot and falling

And you grab me
So the blood jumps into my teeth

And 'Quick!' you whisper, 'O quick!'
And 'Now! Now! Now!'

Now what?

That I hear the age of the earth?

That I feel
My mother lift me up from between her legs?


Ted Hughes, from 'Gaudete'

By the smoking remains of the plantation

By the smoking remains of the plantation
we shelter on the dirt-strewn floor of the Rush room.

Blow pipes find a vantage-point through parted grass;
they will each grab an arm, they will slice off your hair.

The peace of our minds is disturbed
by strange echoes of miscegenation.
Under sentence of death we track the stars.

"What", we asked Boo from our cage,
"do they intend to do with us?"
Boo pointed grimly to Clothcat,
tossed to lie torn and unstitched
with the mummified woodlice.

"Students of heart sacrifice", he stated philosophically,
"believe it to have been a comparatively painless death".

We had talked quite pleasantly I thought with the chief of the tribe.
"If you point at a rainbow", he told us, "your arm will fall off".

"I've always wondered", I asked Boo, "about the woodlice".
"They're just distractions", he replied, "discarded bribes".
And as we waited for the sun to dawn I came to know
all about the courtship of spiders.

The courtship of spiders

The male spider has to offer the female spider a gift.
If they find nothing else they even offer a woodchip
cunningly wrapped in silk.

Some inadequate spiders just offer a bundle of web.
The female mostly notices this, and fiercely rejects it.
Sometimes the male persists.

Spiders often demonstrate extreme sexual dimorphism.
The male can be tiny. Seeing them come back again and again
they seem wonderfully brave.

If the female captures the male I don't think he feels much pain.
Their heads are gnawed off at the neck but it's nothing personal.
A matter of instinct.

When spiderlings hatch, they all hastily flee from each other.
If you can confine them to one spot they will eat each other.
None of them know better.

from The Bell Curve

A Marxist fairytale

A photo by Romain Slocombe

Porn doors explode!

I've just seen the John Waters film Cecil B. Demented. Well, it was OK. Actually I hate the kids, and it was definitely a film made with the kids in mind. But then, if it was propaganda, it was at least propaganda in a righteous cause. John Waters obviously has a lot of respect for Spike Lee. The kids in Cecil B. were standard issue multicultural, which was a bit of a disappointment. The racial politics of Pink Flamingos was much more intriguing. We see Divine going to the post office and striding along the sidewalk. Strange that it's a black neighbourhood. We see the passersby looking astonished, but in a guarded rather than a hostile way. The post office workers are too shocked to say anything. This is the White Queen, maggoty-beautiful, casting all shame to the winds.

By the way, I think the same actor who plays the Chief on the tropical island in Emanuelle in America is the same man who spoons out the eye from the severed head in Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals. Spike Lee's Bamboozled wasn't the first film to mash its teeth into race prejudice, to inhabit its stereotypes to such an extreme degree that they transgress themselves, bursting into liberating pieces. Joe d'Amato (who else?)'s films are a richly coloured travelogue, a wildly-spiced carnival of racial stereotypes driven to their last absurd limits, a racial delirium. And I think that the actors enjoy themselves, by and large. The three above-mentioned directors all prefer to work with a a team they know well, a travelling community of the otherwise unemployable (and in the case of Spike Lee, who else would give African-Americans such decent parts?), forming a supportive environment for the creation of a liberated community.

The carnival of perversion, dreams of miscegenation. Divine with the giant lobster. The best scene in the oeuvre.

Sombre too, as we watch the black minstrels burning the cork before the mirror, the candle flame shining in the curve of the spoon. And in the shots of the toys and little ornaments at the end of Bamboozled, we see the complexity and strangeness of hatred, the eerie fascination of these defunct, absurd objects. Seeing the sequence of old films, silent-era, talkies and cartoons, all showing negroes in absurd or demeaning roles, one wants somehow to reach out and pay some sort of honour to the players. Why is this? Some sort of yearning, not guilt or self-hatred, not sentimentality either, exactly. A girl with a scarf on her head, looking out to the left and smiling, how well-observed it is, and how tenderly moulded. Are black people better observers of whites than vice versa? Compassion arises from precise observation, from simply deciding to look. In all these objects (many from Spike Lee's own collection), we see something divided aginst itself - complex, hostile, and full of longing.

Time-like delirium cools at this crossing

The Pulley

When God at first made man,
Having a glass of blessings standing by,
Let us (said he) pour on him all we can:
Let the world's riches, which dispersed lie,
Contract into a span.

So strength first made a way;
Then beauty flowed, then wisdom, honour, pleasure:
When almost all was out, God made a stay,
Perceiving that alone of all his treasure
Rest in the bottom lay.

For if I should (said he)
Bestow this jewel also on my creature,
He would adore my gifts instead of me,
And rest in nature, not the God of Nature:
So both should losers be.

Yet let him keep the rest,
But keep them with repining restlessness:
Let him be rich and weary, that at least,
If goodness lead him not, yet weariness
May toss him to my breast.


George Herbert, from The Temple 1633

The poet prays to the Virgin for help

I pray to the Divine Mother of God,
Heavenly Queen of all living things,
that she grant me the pure light of the little animals
that have a single letter in their vocabulary.
Animals without souls. Simple shapes.
Far from the cat's despicable knowledge.
Far from the owl's fictitious profundity.
Far from the horse's sculptural wisdom.
Creatures that love without eyes,
with a single sense of infinity's waves,
that gather in great piles
to be eaten by birds.
Grant me the single dimension
that little flat animals have
so that I can tell of things covered with earth
beneath the hard innocence of the shoe.
No one weeps because he understands
the millions of tiny deaths at the marketplace,
the Chinese multitude of headless onions,
and that great yellow sun of old, flattened fish.

You, Mother, forever to be feared. Whale of all the skies,
You, Mother, forever joking. Neighbour of the borrowed parsley.
You know that to speak of the world
I must understand its slightest flesh.


Federico Garcia Lorca

from Lecture: Poet in New York
(translated by Christopher Maurer)

a photograph by Tomatsu Shomei

Tomatsu Shomei - a Japanese photographer, famous for his pictures from the atomic ruins of Nagasaki, black and white pictures full of love for the surfaces of things, for their grain and decay. But his pictures convey real human sympathy too. They are never just dreamy still-lives, but even his inanimate objects have a human vulnerability to them, either warmth, or the coldness of departed life. This picture was taken in 1971, and a whole book of Tomatsu's pictures is available cheap! from Phaidon in their 55 Photographers series.

A beautiful ancient American face

A Mayan ceremonial mask, made of jade and found in a royal tomb. I thought only the Japanese made things as beautiful as this...

(AD 250 - 900)

Bàrd Seòirseach Bhàsia Psiaibheala le theaghlach

Georgian poet Vazha Pshavela (1861 - 1915) with his family

Iranian pilgrims at the tomb of Hafez

Xochi Pilli

Immeasurable pain!
My dreaming soul last night was king again.
As in past days
I wandered through the Palace of Delight,
And in my dream
Down grassy garden ways
Glided my chariot, smoother than a summer stream.
There was moonlight,
The trees were blossoming,
And a faint wind softened the air of night,
For it was spring.

Arthur Waley

Castle Moil