Tellus Issue 3

Posted on April 22, 2012 by

The third issue of Ailsa Hunt’s journal of poetry inspired by the classical world.
Brian Walter’s “Metrodorus of Skepsis” introduces (to me) this scholar who famously used 360 regions of the zodiacal sky as mnemonic locations for ‘everything he’d ever heard’. The poem doesn’t knock me out, but plays cleverly with the randomness of what we remember, the little details. More focus on apparently random details in Carolyn Dille’s “Clio at the Blue Note”, an imagining of the Muse of History performing at a jazz club, which turns the infinite details of history and causation into a bravura improvisation, ending with the memorable ‘Chernobyl’s chatter, Mikínai’s murmuring stones’.
James Norcliffe’s “Cyclops” takes a few readings, and/but communicates really well the paradox of an ugly, reclusive divine being, shunning life with the gods for the ‘back of the cave’, feeding on ‘sashimi seamen’; Norcliffe takes the same line as Zachary Mason’s story “Blindness” story in the brilliant The Lost Books Of The Odyssey. And Niamh Corcoran, in “Figurehead”, powerfully, in a sequel to Sappho’s fragment 22, describes a strongly physical and lustful relationship (‘Summer came and your love came at me / like a figurehead, bold Venus chiseled / into the prow of the craft’). Nicely evocative descriptions of greedy sex, always tasteful, but in the final words (‘current after cutwater’) surely hinting at the organ central to such lesbian goings on?
But the best poem, imho, is Sarah Johnson’s “On Not Knowing Greek”, on the surface a simple account of trying to work out the meaning of a passage of Greek, and then, on the walk home, watching a dog grab a stick. But the dog grabbing the stick is compared to the hunting hound grabbing Actaeon’s ankle, thereby deftly making the poem into a little meditation on the search for meaning: Johnson’s earlier stanzas are then read as an analogue to Actaeon’s pushing through the branches to get a forbidden glimpse of Artemis bathing (“I worried the tangle for hours, / with Smyth’s Grammar open, / showing its pale belly”), so the poem suggests that a text’s meaning, once spied, can come back and bite you, that the scholarly quest is a kind of indecent, or illicit, prying. Something Johnson’s poem itself demonstrates.

Posted in Poem | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

The success of Jesus and Socrates

Posted on March 25, 2012 by

Jesus and Socrates are standard examples of being counter-cultural, of teaching the unpalatable, of advocating unacceptable behaviour, of giving explanations which oppose those of their societies: “The Sabbath was made man, not man for the Sabbath”, “pray for those who hate you”, “no one sins knowingly”, “harming someone does them no actual damage, but rather damages the person doing the harming”.
Yet the facts that their teachings have survived, that many followed and follow them, show at the very least that there is an appetite for the ‘unacceptable’, even among those who do not put these teachings into practice. At the heart of ‘conventional’ attitudes is a place reserved for an alternative, respected but not practised.

Posted in Stuff | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

I Believe in Father Christmas

Posted on March 21, 2012 by

The story goes that some Japanese businessmen wanted to decorate their shopping centre for the Christmas season, so they sent researchers to the UK to get some ideas. Some time later the shopping centre opened with great razzmatazz, and the assembled crowds were greeted with the sight, on the outer wall of the complex, of a giant Father Christmas nailed to a cross. People don’t usually confuse the two Christmas figures of Jesus and Santa, but I’m going to.
There’s more that links them. Santa is used as a stick and (literally, alongside a glass of brandy) as a carrot to improve behaviour in the young (‘he’s gonna find out who’s naughty or nice’), as is God for older people. Santa’s rewards are deferred within the few months of a child’s horizon; God’s to the horizon of death.
Although belief in Father Christmas is used as a standard example of a childish belief easily shed as we get older, belief in him is just as childish, and just as rational, as belief in God. And also, conversely, belief in God is just as childish, and just as rational, as belief in Father Christmas.
Greg Lake’s song I Believe in Father Christmas uses loss of faith in Father Christmas as a symbol of loss of faith in Christianity, made explicit in ”till I believed in the Israelite’. (In that way it shares with Blake’s Jerusalem the honour of being a song happily sung to celebrate the very thing it seeks to undermine.) Here’s the whole song:

They said there’ll be snow at Christmas
They said there’ll be peace on earth
But instead it just kept on raining
A veil of tears for the virgin’s birth
I remember one Christmas morning
A winters light and a distant choir
And the peal of a bell and that Christmas tree smell
And their eyes full of tinsel and fire

They sold me a dream of Christmas
They sold me a silent night
And they told me a fairy story
’till I believed in the Israelite
And I believed in Father Christmas
And I looked at the sky with excited eyes
’till I woke with a yawn in the first light of dawn
And I saw him and through his disguise

I wish you a hopeful Christmas
I wish you a brave new year
All anguish pain and sadness
Leave your heart and let your road be clear
They said there’ll be snow at Christmas
They said there’ll be peace on earth
Hallelujah noel be it heaven or hell
The Christmas you get you deserve

So how can I believe in Father Christmas? It’s hard not to, if I believe in Jesus. Both stories convey human truth. Belief in Santa accords perfectly with the worldview of a small child: most of what happens in their world operates outside the natural laws of grown-ups, so there’s nothing difficult or bizarre about the nice old chap in Coca-Cola red who delivers presents across the world. And the story of Jesus, a defenceless underclass baby containing the potential of the cosmos, is a perfect one for giving grown-ups hope.
Aidan Andrew Dun said that the world is not made of atoms, but of stories. He is making the same point as Sherlock Holmes, when he angrily scolds Watson for telling him that the earth revolves around the sun. Geocentricity and atoms may be true and real, but they are of no importance to our daily lives; stories on the other hand directly inform our minute-by-minute existence of trafficking power, love and ideas with our fellows. And, in another sense, even geocentricity and atoms are only comprehensible to us as stories. Don Cupitt rightly argues that any philosophy worth anything has to start from, and be based in, our ordinary lives.

The Christmas we get we deserve.

I wish you a hopeful Christmas.

God comes to grown-ups in the form of a story about a Christmas baby; and to infants as a story about a jolly chap with a sack. Both are true.

Posted in Stuff | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

The Shawshank Redemption

Posted on March 11, 2012 by

Why is this a bad film? Because it’s not true to life. The goodies are unrelentingly good, so it’s sentimental, and the baddies all bad, so it’s brutalised. Typical moronic box-office desperation: crank up the violence to make ‘em feel bad, crank up the sentiment to make ‘em feel that redemptive-thingy, like when Truman sails his yacht through the paper sky.

It’s not ALL bad: when Dufresne plays The Magic Flute through the tannoy, grown men feel their eyes prick. And it’s good when Red gets released. But Warden Norton’s unnecessary suicide, Hadley’s unmitigating angry sadism, and Morgan Freeman’s calm Dumbledore trick wore me out. They’re all working too HARD.

I haven’t read Stephen King’s book, but might have suspected the hand behind the film: the clever plotting and extreme unpleasantness UNredeemed by any genuine humanity.

Posted in Film | Leave a comment

Rowan the wizard

Posted on March 11, 2012 by

Rowan Williams is how we imagine Pozzo’s Lucky in the days when he used to delight his master with his ‘thinking’ (Waiting for Godot, Act One:)

He even used to think very prettily once, I could listen to him for hours. Now . . . (he shudders)

Rowan speaks both as someone who has already, and for some time, thought deeply about whatever he’s talking about, and also as someone who is thinking about it for the first time, who is feeling his way. Such wise honesty, such honest wisdom.

Posted in Stuff | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

19th-century Paris and the Net

Posted on February 15, 2012 by

Strange the way we misinterpret. An essay by Morozov in the New York Times (discussed by John Naughton in the Observer, 120212) compares (by the by, as far as this post is concerned) the net to 19th-century Paris: the labyrinthine medieval city was initially populated by flâneurs, who cruised the ancient arcades for curiosities; they were displaced by Baron Haussmann, “who remodelled the urban maze of medieval Paris into a tidy metropolis of wide boulevards that facilitated troop movements and cannon fire”.

Posted in Stuff | Leave a comment

“The Tao Of Pooh” by Benjamin Hoff; “The Secret Message Of Jesus” by Brian Maclaren (the latter only skimmed)

Posted on February 15, 2012 by

Both try to explain how life should be lived, and to that extent are self-help books. Maclaren writes from within an orthodox US Christian perspective, but reinterprets Jesus’ message as a call to a radical politics and a suspicion of organised religion. Writing too much, and too autobiographically, he nevertheless is right, focusing on the be-like-a-child teaching, something Hoff develops in his clear and fun introduction for Americans to the Tao: doing nothing, being empty, action-through-inaction (Wu Wei), being clever not wise. P.155:

Within each of us there is an Owl [scholarly show-off], a Rabbit [control-freak], an Eeyore [whiner], and a Pooh [cool exponent of the Tao]. For too long, we have chosen the way of Owl and Rabbit. Now, like Eeyore, we complain about the results. But that accomplishes nothing. If we are smart, we will choose the way of Pooh. As if from far away, it calls to us with the voice of a child’s mind. It may be hard to hear at times, but it is important just the same, because without it, we will never find our way through the Forest.

Posted in Reading | Tagged , , | Leave a comment