Poem: Within the Heart of Each of Us

WITHIN THE HEART OF EACH OF US
THERE DWELLS A PRIVATE GRIEF

My father is a lonely man,
He has one good, bright eye,
A lame foot, a crooked hand,
And a heart twisted and wry.

He came from the east,
From the mountainous rim
Of this green valley, the last
He'll see before his eye dims.

He broke his oaken staff
On the back of a red-eyed wolf
That then lay stark and stiff.
His good, bright knife
He left in the heart
Of another beast's life.

His body broken and worn,
Of his weapons bereft,
My father waits for the lion
That will ransom his death.

[1978; publ. in Northern Ontario Anthology, Cobalt, Ontario]

Poem: The Sea Son's Eyes Are Blue and Green

THE SEA SON'S EYES ARE BLUE AND GREEN
GOLDEN FISHES SWIM THEREIN
A poem for many voices

stars shape faces in his head, burst
coalesce and grow like trees
an old man's face
looms in the branches
see, see his hair
entangled in the boughs
see, see his hair
entangled in the branches of anemones

stars burst on the rocking water

I am scattered over the water
my fragments are scattered over the water
my face is entangled in the pattern the waves make
I am reborn in every motion of the water

stars burst in the rocking water

he gathers them into his head
they glitter
in the darkness
they blaze like the sun
that shattered on the water and became stars
bursting in the sea son's head, in silence
that touched the inside of his face
and grew like a tree

In that other place where these things happened
I sat me down by the waters of language and wept,
For behold, I had no face, my name was taken from me
And given to the wind.

[1973; publ. in 39 Below, Edmonton]

Book Review: Muller, Tannen und Wolken

Müller, Dr. Phil Karl Friedrich Tannen und Wolken (Firs and Clouds) (1934) A curious book. Fay found it at a yard sale, and bought it for me. The copyright date is significant - one year after Hitler was made Führer by a vote of the Reichstag (that Hitler became dictator by legal means is something that is rarely taught, and never emphasised.) The publisher describes itself as “Volkskunstverlag”, “publisher of folk arts.” This does not refer to naive painting, it refers to the arts of (and about) the Volk, the German people. The racist undertones are deliberate.

Also significant is the author’s academic title – Germans have overvalued such titles for generations, with some justification, since it was the ramping up of secondary and post-secondary education that enabled Germany to speed up its industrial revolution in the 1800s. But the assumption that a man with a D. Phil (and a Leica) will be a better photographer than the ordinary shutterbug is of course nonsense. The photos in this album are second-rate considered as art, and merely average considered as tourist snapshots. They are pleasant enough, and would grace a family album, in which they would serve to recall a hiking holiday. Müller uses all the rules of composition and landscape lighting – trees etc in the foreground to frame the distant vista, white clouds contrasting against the sky (difficult to do with the films of the time), layers of hills fading away to create the illusion of depth. He knows his stuff. But the pictures are banal and ultimately boring. They have some interest as documentation of the rapidly disappearing farm architecture of the region. But they don’t do what even many casual snapshots do: make us see the object with new eyes. They merely confirm the sentimental “Heimatliebe” (love of the homeland) that the Nazis pretended was the essence of patriotism.

What’s interesting is the almost total absence of any modern artifacts - no roads, no cars, no power lines, no agricultural machinery. The Black Forest is presented as an almost medieval landscape of peasant farms and semi-wilderness. Only the few people in modern dress, shown walking away from the camera, indicate that these photos were made in the 20th century. Why this nostalgia for a country life that never existed? In part, this is the debased legacy of Romanticism, the revulsion against modern technology and cities. But since it went further in its kitschiness in Nazi Germany than anywhere else, I think it’s also part of the Nazi ideology of Blut und Boden, blood and soil. It’s easier to feel sentimental about the farm, the forest, the mountains, to pretend that this supposedly more virtuous way of life still exists, than to face up to the injustices of corporate capitalism. We have a version of this sentimental claptrap in our own times: the idealisation of the small town. *

Stone Kiss (Book Review)

Faye Kellerman, Stone Kiss (2002)

Decker is asked to help find the missing niece of his half brother’s wife. But when he gets to New York, the family puts him off. He looks up an old nemesis, Chris Donatti, whom he sprung from jail because the evidence had been cooked, and who has become a major supplier of drugs and women. Donatti becomes a key figure in the denouement, and even more entangled with Decker and his family. The family, personal, and business relationships are a tangled mess, not clarified by corrupt cops, religious scruples, and horrific family dysfunction. Donatti is a psychopath, which makes for tension and violence, but when his purposes coincide with Decker’s, he is an ally. He uses violence as a tool, with no particular pleasure.

In fact, the book has a lot of violence – Kellerman is clearly angling for a wider audience. The result is a book that’s very TV, even its elucidation of the sources of evil has that facile psycho-babble that makes so much American TV less than credible. The accounts of Jewish life are, as always, interesting, and I must take them at face value. In the books between the first two (I read the second one) and this one, Decker has discovered his birth family, which was Jewish, so he turns out to be Jewish after all. But he still has close ties to his adoptive family. Etc. These aspects of the narrative are more interesting than the violence, which feels more like a movie than real life. A minor disappointment, despite its swift narrative rhythm. **

Companions on the Road (Book review)

Lee, Tanith Companions on the Road (1975)

This is a quest story. Havor has participated in the destruction of a city, in one of the endless wars of his time and place. He and two others find and steal a chalice of mysterious and very dark powers. It had been used in unspeakable rites by the defeated King and his brother and daughter. Lukon, one of Havor’s comrades dies in the fighting, but not before he gives Havor his savings and enjoins him to bring them to his family, many leagues distant. So Havor, Kachil the thief, and Feluce the corporal of dubious antecedents, set out to fulfill Havor’s vow, and with luck sell the chalice and divide the loot. But ghosts accompany them, and first Kachil and then Feluce die, somehow destroyed in a dream encounter with the daughter of the King who owned the evil vessel. Havor manages to survive, but only because he has fulfilled his vow to Lukon, and in his dream encounter with ghosts pities their spiritually wasted lives and their present condition. He will marry Silsi, Lukon’s sister, and have as contented a life as is possible.

Lee writes a spare but lyrical style, which moves the story forward briskly. She is very good at producing and maintaining an atmosphere of struggle against the weather (wintry), the people (taciturn and unwilling to help), conflict within the little group of three unwilling allies, and a dreamworld that lethally impinges on the waking reality. The characters of course represent the Jungian archetypes, Havor the ego, Kachil the alter ego, Feluce and the ghostly princess the animus and anima. They are well drawn, having about them enough individuality that we care about them as people, yet never forget their roles in a drama that we all know well.

As in all quests, the plot turns on inward growth and increasing knowledge: Havor must learn who he is by surviving tests not only of his physical prowess but more importantly of his moral worth. The intended audience is the middle school child, and I think the book would appeal as much to girls as to boys. At any rate, I will pass it on to Bria and Connor, and see what they think of it. A well done example of its kind. **-½

Book Review: Major Barbara (GBS)

Shaw, George Bernard Major Barbara (1906)

Shaw’s Preface is as outrageously wrongheaded as usual: he loved the sound of his own ideas. His comments on the way the world works are as acutely and cynically accurate as always, but his inferences about how we should deal with it simply miss the mark. He is very good at presenting us with real and lifelike characters, but when he thinks about people he goes awry. It’s as if his intellect and his imagination don’t know of each other’s existence. The play works well, and would be a pleasure to see. The plotting is perhaps a trifle too pat, but that’s GBS for you: he will make his plays demonstrate his ideas, and that’s when the machinery creaks. When he just goes with his imagination, as in the Salvation Army scenes, the results are brilliant, witty, emotionally true, and beautifully paced. ***

Book Review: John Bull's Other Island (GBS)

Shaw, George Bernard John Bull’s Other Island (1907)

I started to read the preface and gave up. GBS was not the best analyst of politics - his notions of how the Irish Question came about and how it should be resolved were shown to miss the point by events. About the only thing he seems to have gotten right was that it would be a protracted and bloody affair if it wasn’t settled quickly.

The one thing GBS never seems to have fully understood was the lure of power for its own sake. (This leads him to make Undershaft a seeker after profit, which is the only serious flaw in Major Barbara. Profit (money) is a means and instrument of power, not and end in itself.) Like many idealistic ideologues, he believed that sweet reason would prevail, if it was made clear enough what the benefits would be. He would not recognise the irony of the Canadian toast, “Peace, order, and good government.”

That sheer bloody-mindedness and paranoid delusions are more potent motives than the desire for peace, prosperity, and lawful order was something he could never see. That’s one reason he (like many other Socialists of the time) kept excusing the excesses of Soviet Russia, for example. He was of course right that the Protestants would have nothing to fear in a Catholic united Ireland, but he couldn’t see, because he couldn’t understand, that religious paranoia would prevent a settlement. He also couldn’t see that the IRA was dominated by psychopaths, who carried on their bloody vendettas, not because they expected politically acceptable results, but because they liked the murder and mayhem (as well as the loot).

So I didn’t read the play. I don’t think I missed anything.**