Christian Duty

Religious readers will be glad to hear that the christian duty to help the sick is alive and well. I have just heard of a little girl who, while at church with her mother, suddenly felt sick. Mother told her to go out quietly and find a secluded spot behind the church in which to throw up. The child went, but returned very quickly. 'But I thought you were going out to be sick?' said mother. 'Oh yes I was sick, but I didn't have to go out because in the church entrance I found a big box labelled "For the sick", so...'

Limericks about animals

We haven't had one of those for a while, so here's the next one; we have reached 'O' I think.

‘Don’t expect me,’ said the Owl,
‘to mix with day-birds, cheek by jowl.
I come out at night;
Edward Lear was quite right:
the owl is an elegant  fowl.’

Totally Bonkers

Any of my readers (either of you) who has not yet realized I'm bonkers might like to read the following, originally published in the London Review of Books:

Keep me in!

The list of stories of unjust incarceration for insanity is long, as Susan Eilenberg suggests (LRB, 23 July). Does it still happen? Or have things gone in a completely different direction?
I have been in and out of NHS mental hospitals for more than forty years. The first, following a suicide attempt, was Bethlem Royal, the old Bedlam, by then moved to a huge semi-rural site near Beckenham. On arrival my first feeling was of immense relief; I was in a safe place and didn’t have to worry any more. One almost never saw a psychiatrist; ‘treatment’ consisted of tranquillisers that kept one calm and anti-depressants that did nothing at all; this was in the days before Prozac. But the nurses were friendly and spent all day with the patients, chatting, playing games (Scrabble with schizophrenics can be very entertaining), going for walks in the grounds, even cooking meals with us. The male wing had a full-size snooker table and the female a grand piano, though the eccentricities of women playing snooker and men the piano were tolerated. After the first week or two I could even go for unaccompanied walks in the grounds. It would have been a very nice place to stay if one weren’t mad.
The fact that discharge was never mentioned merely increased my feeling of safety; when after six months I felt ready to face the world again I had no idea how to arrange to be discharged and was a touch afraid that if I asked they might try to keep me in – ‘section’ me, as it’s called. So one day I just walked out. No one came after me.
Three or four years later I was in hospital again: this time at Broadgate, near Beverley in Yorkshire, a huge Victorian place with its own farm. Things were much the same as at Bethlem. Uniquely, I was privileged to see the chief consultant psychiatrist once a week, but that was because I played trumpet to his trombone at the Saturday dances. The nurses spent all day with the patients here too, the only difference – in retrospect an ominous one – being that they had to write brief daily reports on the patients. This duty was taken lightly; one report I saw said: ‘Patient rose at ten thirty and spent the rest of the day in a horizontal position.’ I came across a lot of people shuffling about the corridors who had been in the place many years: however they had come to be there, their only ‘madness’ now was that they were quite unfitted for life outside. Again, after six months I simply walked out.
Looking back, those two places did me a lot of good, in spite of the absence of real treatment. Merely being in a sheltered environment, protected from self-destruction for as long as I needed, was therapy enough. For many years I managed to avoid going into hospital, except for a year at the excellent, intensive, highly successful and soon closed down Paddington Day Hospital.
But about nine years ago I was close to suicide again and found myself being taken into another hospital. Things had changed. Now we had the policy of ‘care in the community’. All notion of protection, of asylum, had gone: a patient (or was it ‘client’?) information leaflet explained that one’s stay would be as brief as possible. Nurses no longer spent much time with patients: they were closeted together in an office filling in ‘care plans’, and could get quite cross if one knocked on the door to point out that a patient was smashing up the furniture or another patient. Usually, in fact, knocks on the door were ignored. True, we saw psychiatrists as often as once a week, but their concern was to see whether we were ready to be discharged. We lived in dread of being called before the psychiatrist: many, including myself, tried to seem madder than we were in the hope of delaying discharge. I managed to stay a month – twice as long as the ‘target’ period – before being ejected despite my vigorous protests.
I was soon back. Returning to the same hospital I expected the nurses to be surprised and disappointed to see me again; they batted not an eyelid. Soon I noticed familiar faces among the other patients; people who had been discharged during my earlier stay and who were back again. Nine years later I have lost count of how many times the NHS has ‘cured’ me of severe depression. Clearly the new policy is statistically – and that’s what counts – very successful. It must have cost them far more than one long stay, but they’ve had half a dozen cures instead of one.
At present, two kinds of people are admitted to NHS mental hospitals: those bonkers enough to be a social inconvenience and those depressed enough to be ready to do away with themselves. If one’s desperate enough to want to get in, the magic word ‘suicide’ whispered in a suitably shamefaced sepulchral tone will do the trick. But mad or sad, one will be out again in two weeks. And back again in another two.
Simon Darragh
Walmer, Kent

Schmoozy Schlepper

Someone of the above name has posted a comment which I have received by e-mail. I tried to reply directly but this silly blog site wouldn't let me, so here's the reply I wrote, copied and pasted in:

Cheers. What an unusual name you have. I suspect a pseudonym. The formatting difficulty you're probably talking about concerned a book I'd just written, using microsoft word, in which I had included not just footnotes but footnotes-to-the-footnotes, also marginal notes (as in Coleridge's 'The Rime of the Ancyent Mariner' if you know it) and when copied and pasted into the blog it all got jumbled. My long-term plan is to scan all my printed publications and put them in the blog, as no-one ever buys my books and I'd rather they were read free than not read at all. But that must wait until I'm back in Greece, where I have a scanner and a computer that can turn word documents into pdf files.

The Bully

It’s a cliché – and like most clichés true – that the bully is a coward.

The archetypal bully – the one we all, or at least all who have ever been their victims, remember – is the playground one. Stocky, ugly, slightly overweight, surrounded by his[1] jeering cronies, he goes for the direct attack, first verbal, then, if that doesn’t seem to his limited perception to have hit home, physical. I mean violent.

I said ‘Direct attack’ and ‘Limited perception’ but a striking (!) feature of the bully is the uncanny intuitive precision of his attack: just where it will hurt most, physically or emotionally. Uncanny, intuitive: he hasn’t intellectually worked out the precise point on his target; some more primitive force is at work: something like a vile perversion of the instinct that makes the lion go for the belly of the wildebeest.

There is also a less easily identifiable kind of bully: one met more often in ‘adult’ life than on the playground. This is the sort whom it would occur to almost nobody to call a bully. Quiet, respectable, unassuming; a nowhere man. He pays his bills promptly and always puts his rubbish out on the right day, properly sorted into the right recycling bins. An unremarkable job in an office; ideally somewhere like the council or the DHSS with its wide opportunities for his joyful pastime.

If, as I believe one can but perhaps shouldn’t, one divides people in general into those whose existence is a net gain and those whose existence is a net loss – and I am still hopeful enough for humanity to think that the former group is far larger than the latter – then this second type of bully is on the debit side. Not individually a vast bank-breaking loss like Hitler or Thatcher; just a nagging discrepancy in the petty cash account. He has never done anything really wicked, but then nor has he ever done anything really good. He has just lived quietly, absorbing what he wants from the world, giving nothing back. He has never loved anyone, and probably never been loved. No-one notices him.

But, distasteful as it will be, one ought to notice him: there’s a good chance he’s one of these closet bullies.

His modus operandi is to lie low and say nothing, just wait, watchfully, possibly for years. Perhaps waiting for a victim to swim into his bottom-feeding fishy gaze, perhaps patiently watching an already-chosen victim. Then he darts out and attacks, retreating at once to his previous impassive position. It is by the uncanny, unerring, instinctive pin-point precision and timing of his attack that one recognizes him as a bully.

Usually no-one notices the attack: not the victim – at least not at once – not the onlooker, and very often not even, consciously, the bully himself. If and when the victim does notice, he rarely retaliates or complains: this meekness is one of the factors in the bully’s choice of victim. If, however, the victim (or more likely some concerned third party to whom the victim has complained) tries to hold the bully to account, he will hold his hands out in a Pilate-like gesture of innocence and say ‘But all I did was… And indeed he has been careful to leave no obvious mark. Just a deep, invisible, unhealable psychic wound.

A thorough psychological study of the Bully Character would be valuable; perhaps someone is writing one or has already done so. An inquiry into what goes wrong in infantile development, at what stage it is arrested, that turns someone into a bully.  

---

[1] The usages ‘His/her’, ‘She/he’ etc. are inelegant and not a solution to the perceived sexism of what we once knew as ‘The inclusive he’, which I continue to use. There are of course as many female as male bullies; victims too.

Limits

Further to the last posting, I think there may be limits. Consider this:

A poet from Azerbaijan
Wrote limericks that just wouldn't scan.
When told it was so
He replied 'Yes I know,
But I try to get as many words into the last line as I can.'

Something beginning with 'N'

Today's limerick:

Said Jill, ‘Whatever’s the matter, Jack?’
As he dropped his pail with a clatter back
Down in the well:
‘There’s no need to yell,
Toads are harmless: it’s only a Natterjack.’

I may have said it before, but never mind: the Limerick is unusual in English verse forms in being almost entirely accentual; most forms are accentual-syllabic. That is to say, provided the 3-3-2-2-3 pattern of stress is kept to, it doesn't really matter how many syllables you squeeze in. However, the following really won't do:

There was an old man of Thermopylae
Whose limericks didn't scan properly.
When they said it was so
He replied 'Yes, I know;
I just go all to pieces with the last line.'

A New Limerick

We have reached letter 'M':

The Latin American Marmoset
Is rare over here. To see far more, set
Sail for Peru:
Not counting the zoo
They don’t live in Sussex or Somerset.

Who is Ozymandias?

The poet John Fuller’s new book of this title looks as if it is intended, by explaining the obscurities of some poems, to explain the obscurity of poetry in general to those who have perhaps exasperatedly given up reading the stuff. I found it so interesting and provocative I wrote to him about it, but can’t find an address for him, so I put it here where he will probably – fortunately or unfortunately – never see it:

I am enjoying your ‘Who is Ozymandias?’ I hope it might show the impatient – if they will only read it – why poems, because they do things with words that words are not supposed to be able to do, can’t help but be difficult.

            Browning and Hardy as precursors of Imagism is a startling notion.

            You talk of ‘Misreading’. Apart from sheer carelessness, such as the common and I think disastrous change to ‘Those’ in ‘These who die as cattle’, or the ignorance that assumes, say, that Dr Johnson meant what we should now mean when he found St Paul’s Cathedral ‘Amusing and awful’, I don’t think there can be a misreading of a poem. There might, as you say, be an ill-informed reading, and certainly my appreciation of Eliot’s poetry has changed now that I can catch at least some of his allusions, references, and quotations. It might be interesting – though it might also put blinkers on one – to know in reading ‘Dover Beach’ that Arnold shared contemporary fears about Darwin and Christianity,  but a poem has to grab one – as ‘Dover Beach’ did me – to begin with if one is ever to bother much with it, and there are many critics who say we shouldn’t bring any external knowledge to our reading. An impossible requirement; one’s mere ability to read at all is something learnt and so all one has read is brought to what one reads. Incidentally what I bring to ‘Dover Beach’, because I grew up there, is Arnold out on a balcony at the White Cliffs Hotel and his wife inside calling ‘Come in Matt; you’ll catch your death out there.’

            My point though is that poems contain multitudes, most of them unknown to the poet. If we accept the idea of ‘inspiration’ – that poems, albeit later worked on, start from somewhere strange, dictated by God or one of Rilke’s angels or, more fashionably now, the poet’s unconscious, of which by definition the poet himself ‘knows’ nothing, then it seems to me the poet might well be the very last person to know what his poem is ‘about’; haven’t you have noticed that in your own writing? You might say that what is now accepted as the ‘correct’ interpretation of an image or whole poem reveals depths and subtleties otherwise lost; I might say that an ‘incorrect’ one reveals other and just possibly greater ones. Your rival lecturer was half right: the opening of ‘Maud’ doesn’t have to be about menstruation as well, but it certainly can be, and so long as we don’t just take it on a lecturer’s authority we can let the idea enrich our reading. With respect, I think you take a more indulgent view of your own interpretations than of other people’s.

            So there are no misreadings: a poem can be and indeed really is about anything and everything each and every one of its readers thinks it is.

            Now I feel moved to apologise for my temerity: it’s clear both from this new book and from your own poetry that you know far more about it all than I do. Still…

P.S. I’m afraid your printers have, as they always do, mangled your Greek: ‘Sphinx’ is from σφιγγειν, not the unpronounceable σφιγγειυ. But you have corrected a life-long mistake: although I have spent half my life in Greece and even had a close friend from (Greek) Thebes, I always thought Oedipus’s Sphinx was the one in Egypt and must have had a suppressed idea of a quick cross-Mediterranean trip.

It could have been a useful, valuable, even (if like me you think poetry is vitally important) necessary book. If it is really intended for the general reader it fails, because, like the high court judge who smiles patronizingly as he peers over his half-moon spectacles to ask ‘Who is David Beckham?’ it or he is donnishly distant from his intended audience. It assumes a familiarity with many really rather difficult poems and takes for granted a knowledge of Greek and Roman history and mythology, and so will cause as much exasperation to the poetically perplexed as the very poems that have brought them to the book.

John Fuller is preaching to the converted.

Free Verse

Robert Frost – that most conventional and formal of late twentieth century poets, and that’s not a negative judgement – famously said that writing free verse was like playing tennis with the net down, by which he almost certainly meant that it was pointless; not worth doing. But one can imagine two really expert tennis players deciding to put the net down in order to play a freer, more imaginative game. True, the audience for such a game would probably be limited to connoisseurs.

Another analogy is the later paintings of Picasso, at which the philistine snorts and says ‘I could have done that’, to which the answer is ‘No you couldn’t, and anyway you didn’t’, the point being that to arrive at his later style Picasso passed a long apprenticeship of studying, copying, and producing more conventional pictures.

The really good writers of free verse – not those who imagine, like our present poet laureate, that they can splurge onto paper some untransformed and rather revolting effusion of emotion and call it a poem – have worked hard to reach the point where they can write as they do. If you look at their juvenilia you nearly always find a large body of poetry that uses rhyme and metre, and often such formal structures as the sonnet, the villanelle, and even the sestina.

It is in fact very difficult to write good free verse. It takes either great skill or great poetic energy (whatever that is); preferably both.

I am a very minor poet, and all the poetry I have published has been formal and structured. All but one poem, which made it into an anthology called ‘In the Company of Poets’. Here it is:

I’m After Leaving Monaghan

Your husband comes in, swings his leg over the arm of the chair.
He complains there is no food in the house.
Oh, you’ve made sure of tea-bags —
hundreds and hundreds of tea-bags, in a big green catering box —
sugar, milk in two-litre plastic jugs,
bread-butter-jam —
but no real food.
He seems to think you should have got some in.
I want to protest; he could surely do it himself.
After all, you are lying half-naked, half-in half-out of bed,
and hampered by me, lying half-on half-off the bed,
whereas he is up and fully dressed.
But it is not my place to come between man and wife.
So I say nothing. I let my eyelids fall closed.

Your left breast is crumpled under my arm, nipple half-hidden in a fold of flesh.
I want to release it, move my hand a little, make you more comfortable,
but I fear it might be taken, by you or by him, as a caress.

I think I hear your husband say ‘And what’s up with him?’
and am moved, nearly, to say ‘It is not my place to come between man and wife.’
But I may have misheard, or he might not have been addressing you.
After all, apart from us three, there are two other people in the room,
who just dropped in for tea.

I think I hear you whisper ‘Help me!’
But I may be mistaken; you may be whispering something else,
or you might be addressing someone else, and my eyes are still shut,
and besides, it is not my place to come between man and wife.

My face nests in the soft spun gold
at the crown of your dear, dear head.
Everyone feels at a disadvantage.
It is a tricky situation.

Simon Darragh

 

Confusion

Or did I mean 'Overestimate' in what I just said about art experts? Yes I think I did. It is often easy (or seldom difficult) to get confused with these multiple qualifications. Why didn't I just say 'Art experts often have bad taste'? Or 'Art experts rarely have good taste'? Oh I think I'll pour myself anothet G&T. (With I&L).

Discouraged

It is discouraging that, judging from the total absence of responses, no-one seems to be interested in this blog. Nevertheless here, at least, is the next limerick:

The woolly camelious Llama
is sometimes confused with the Lama.
Two ‘L’s for the beast,
one ‘L’ for the priest
in Tibet, who knows all about karma.

By the way, the new picture at the top of the blog was for a long time thought to be by Botticelli. It seems incredible that such a piece of chocolate-box kitsch could have been so attributed, but one should never underestimate the critical faculties of art experts.

P.S. I really had to take that awful pseudo-Botticelli off the top of the blog, but here it is for anyone interested.

Another limerick. We have reached 'K'.

Of the Kite the poet now sings —
What, one of those things that has strings?
But that’s too absurd —
We’ve inferred that his word
Referred to a bird, that has wings.

Today's limerick

We have now reached 'J':

The Jabberwock said ‘I’m not real,
whatever Charles Dodgson might feel —
(I must say I think he
was just a bit kinky) —
but my portrait’s been done by Tenniel.’

Was this the face that launched a thousand ships?

Consider the following scenario, some of which has already been enacted:
A hotel chambermaid says a guest sexually assaulted her. The alleged perpetrator is arrested. He turns out to be the head of the IMF. Consequently he is unable to attend a meeting with Angela Merkell, which was to be followed by a meeting of the IMF to discuss the rescue of several European economies. The man is asked to resign, and is replaced by a less Euro-friendly person. Those economies are not rescued and collapse, bringing down the economies of the other European countries. World-wide economic crisis follows.
The (modern) Greeks have a saying, which I transliterate as I have not yet learnt how to type in Greek on this blog:
'Tricha mouniou travaei kai karavi.'
'The hair of a pussy can tow a ship.'

The Lost Childhood

I think that was the name of the story. By Graham Greene: it had the moral profundity of his more serious novels, but concentrated into the short story form, making it particularly brilliant and distressing. It had as epigraph a quotation which either he got wrong or I have remembered wrongly: In the lost childhood of Judas was Christ betrayed. Correctly it is ‘In the lost boyhood of Judas Christ was betrayed’ and it is from a poem by the Irish writer and nationalist George William Russell, who published under the pseudonym Æ.

The point of course is that those who are betrayed in their childhood grow up to be betrayers. I think the poem pre-dates Freud. It is an example of the way in which poetry, with its way of using language in a sideways or under- (or over-) hand way can say things that ‘normal’ language is not yet able to articulate. Æ was not an ‘advanced’ poet; like many people who are politically radically left, he was literarily conservative. Poets, including the most conventional, are the pioneers of language, and so of thought.

Today's limerick

We have reached the letter 'I':

The nocturnal Egyptian Ichneumon
eats crocodile’s eggs by the new moon
on the banks of the Nile;
a habit so vile
one could almost believe he were human.

Banana skins

Or 'peels' as the silly question in the 'profile' put it. The subject reminds me of early silent films; the funny sort known as 'slapstick', although an actual slapstick (how many people have seen or indeed heard one?) needs a soundtrack. A cliche (sorry about the lack of the acute accent on the 'e'; as remarked before this blog system is only semi-literate) of the silent comedy was the banana skin thrown into the street, on which someone subsequently slipped. This is an example of that thing so beloved of Hollywood, covert censorship: banana skins are not that commonly thrown on the streets, and are not in fact very slippery when walked on. What is, however, very common on the streets, and very slippery, is dogshit. But of course it would never do for American film viewers to be alerted to the existence of dogshit; that would be almost as bad as the revelation, by I think the sister of Michael Jackson, that even American women have nipples. So - the films use banana skins instead. (No not instead of nipples; instead of dogshit. But then again...)
But never mind. One can think of it as something really quite sophisticated: an extended metaphor; even a metaphysical conceit. Culture is where you find it.

'Adult' Content

As I browsed through the 'settings' and 'edit' facilities on this blogsite (is that a word? Well it is now) I was asked if I wished to show 'adult content' on my site. Of course I do; I am an adult and most of my readers (if any) are probably adults of some sort. Much that I write and quote would be beyond the understanding of, say, a seven year old. (Much, too, would probably only be understood by a seven year old, but that is another matter.) So I clicked 'Yes'. Now it seems my blog wil be headed with a 'warning', to ward off people who might be offended by 'adult' content.
Of course I do know what 'adult' is supposed to mean in such contexts. It is interesting how the word has been usurped (it means 'hijacked', you at the back of the class) to mean its opposite: 'Adult content' is a phrase used by the semi-literate to mean its opposite: infantile or immature content designed to arouse people whose sexual and emotional development got stuck very early on. Now I suppose there might be a little of that sort of thing in this blog, but unless you're polymorphously perverse you won't find much. Sorry to disappoint you. No, I really am sorry, so from time to time I'll drop in something that might appeal. Meanwhile you might like to check out the paintings of Balthus.

Today's limerick

‘Please don’t mock us,’ said the Giraffe t-
o someone who thought their necks daft;
‘a diet arboreal
needs six foot or more. We all
think it’s quite rotten you laughed.’

Since there were problems with the blog during the last two days, you get an extra limerick today:

The Hawk swoops on things from the air,
and carries them back to his lair.
I suppose it’s not nice
for the little field-mice,
but the hawk doesn’t care — so there.