Ya wanna go to War, boy? Oh yes please sir yes please sir yes please sir…..

My crumbling brain can’t recall the artist responsible for the song quoted from above, which I was requested by a class of German school-kids somewhere around 1970 to translate and “interpret”for them (they were pretty anti-war then, I don’t know about now), but I do remember the line previous to that quoted, which was part of a catechism on “what you wanna do, boy?” and which went “do ya wanna dig – potatas, son? “ to which Son’s response was “uh-uh”, so he was obviously not some Sam Gamgee-type loser, but more likely one of those nice middle-class all-American boys you’d find backpacking around Europe in the 1960s, hoping to avoid the Draft and a possible posting to Viet Nam.

Changed days, I deem, and I’m wondering what sort of uphill struggle may lie ahead for General Sir Patrick Sanders, the “head of the British Army” as he squints ahead into the times we shall shortly be entering .

Well, first of all back a bit. When Covid first hit and beneath the disguise of headless chickens running around clucking about how dangerous and awful it all was, a clear and cold message came through to the population at large, reinforced by various regulations whose purpose was never quite clear – the message being that we had all to pull together because we were All In It Together, just like (I’m sure someone said) in the War…. I remember thinking, are we by any chance being prepped for an actual War? I think at the time I had been focussed on my perception that violence and war – particularly of the heroic and yet pathos-full type – was somehow appearing increasingly on the “entertainment” menu, both fantastic and historical-realistic, being offered on both sides of the Atlantic. Maybe the perception was a little skewed by the film industry’s ever-developing ability to present war narratives so slickly and with such an arresting command of very loud noises and very bright colours, and of course the heroic or pathos-laden is never far away either.

Little did I know at the time that a very real – if comfortably virtual, decently proxy – war was about to break out here in Europe. This war of course came at a very opportune time, because the “we’re all in it together” narrative had worn a bit thin as the various junketings and cavortings of the Governmental party-goers made it clear that they weren’t too interested in practising what they preached.

Personally I was never that bothered about the guys wanting to party – quite apart from sneakingly sympathising with anyone who lives by the “anything for a piss-up” creed, especially if you’re plonked into a scary situation and expected to let the whole country see you Taking Charge, even more especially if the scary situation involved – as I’m sure everyone at least guessed from the outset – a leak from a biotech lab; but the main reason why I took the attitude, oh let them party, why not? they’re only Tories, was that I – apparently unlike the majority of British public – was under no illusion but that Covid, or at least the way it was being presented, was one great big scam that was actually being perpetrated on the entire citizenry of the West. So basically by the time people had twigged that we were not, after all, “all in it together”, and had indeed started to get angry, what should happen along but a real war with a real bogeyman who wanted to take over the world and so you see after all we really were all in it together – and of course it was all so unexpected: there we were all getting along fine, all in it together, not too happy about seeing the economy go down the tubes but well at least the vaccine was saving lives wasn’t it – and suddenly bam, Russia invades Ukraine, quite out of the blue, quite unprovoked, quite shocking, nobody ever guessed that would happen…..

Well I don’t know what’s currently happening in that war, apart from that the combatants regularly do an exchange of PoWs, which to my primitive mind seems weird. But we all know, don’t we, that the whole horrifying mess is supposed to be a good thing because it’s weakening Russia, and if that means Ukraine losing pretty much an entire generation of young men, well it’s probably worth it because weakening Russia means Saving Democracy.

Why has Russia got so bogged down in its invasion attempt? Not as strong as everyone thought, huh? Maybe held up unexpectedly by the unexpected superiority of our western weaponry – and not even the very latest-and-bestest that we had, for all those super HIMARS and devastating Hellfires and I don’t know what. There’s the heroic resistance of the Ukrainians, of course, which presumably is an example to us all (my own inclination, as already indicated, is to have a big piss-up instead, but I’m sure that’s Bad for Me). Presumably the thing will go on to a stalemate as long as there’s still someone left alive to carry on fighting, or it’ll end in a Big Bang, or it’ll peter out, really it doesn’t matter (apart from , possibly, the Big Bang option – though “we” did survive Chernobyl, didn’t we?) because everything’s actually gone pretty much the way it was intended to – ….well, a proper Russian defeat, like before their last Revolution, or Vlad the Impaler dying or something like that would have been a really nice outcome, but no matter…. But how, you ask, has it “gone the way it was intended”?

….Well, here’s a clue: according to last night’s BBC 6 o’clock news, the aforementioned General Sir Patrick “added his voice to the growing number of senior NATO commanders saying that alliance nations need to start preparing for a potential war with Russia….”

Well there are various estimates of when Russia will be militarily ready to go on and gobble up Poland – three years according to some, ten according to others – and of course the Baltic States are already in the sights. General Sir Patrick Sanders is meanwhile advocating “training a Citizen Army,  which could help fight a war on land if a conflict broke out”. What does that exactly mean? War on which land, apart from anything else – or does he mean war not at sea, or in space?  “We are now”, he warned, a “pre-war generation”. We’d better remember that, so we’ll know what we were, when the time eventually comes. Well, I think…. “all in it together” we may not be, but if you’ve got conscription you don’t actually need to be, because you’ve got mandates and various kinds of coercion – oops sorry, didn’t mean to mention conscription, of course there won’t be any conscription….

I may be some kind of Sam Gamgee-type loser, but I really don’t think I get it. Finland got along with Russia for a good fifty years after the last War, as far as I remember it got a substantial amount of its military hardware from Russia despite its having recently been an ally of Nazi Germany. Now suddenly it realises that Vlad wants to gobble it up and jumps all a-tremble into bed with NATO. Sweden, which was never even part of the Russian Empire (apart from the bit of it that was actually Finland) , co-existed for I don’t know how many centuries with its oversized neighbour, latterly in a state of not always easy neutrality; suddenly it too feels desperately threatened and wants to join the Alliance. If I were conspiracy-minded I’d say it all looks like part of a plan – indeed if I were a cynic to boot,  I’d say it was a last-ditch attempt to boost failing western economies by encouraging a massive arms build-up, a bit like how the Nazis got the German economy back on its feet back in the nineteen-thirties.

General Sanders, presumably anxious to learn from the mistakes of history (come on Paddy, even you can see that would be a bit of a sick joke)reckons that like the Boy Scouts  we need to Be Prepared, otherwise we could find ourselves drifting into a war for which we’re not ready, like in 1914. Well as far as I remember from my history classes, the 1914 war broke out because the network of alliances led to a chain reaction whose logical end was all-round conflagration. I suppose it would be considered a bit naïve to suggest that grand alliances formed to neutralise a perceived enemy can only too easily lead to otherwise level-headed nations being dragged into war. I don’t think there’s any big Conspiracies here, though I do think the Covid creed invoked the “wartime spirit” because a few people in the corridors of power knew quite well that a war was already being planned but as usual needed a few extra ingredients before the sluggiush populace could be dragged out of its comfort zone. But it was nothing as complex as a conspiracy – just a vague collective intention and a bit of opportunism. Apart from that all it needed was the usual muddle-headedness plus that old Pandora’s Box, the real villain of the piece, runaway technology, whose rule is, use it or lose it.

In the nature of things there are far fewer people around now who think back nostalgically to the “wartime spirit” – because actually, we all really do love being “all in it together”, which is what the Tories have been trying to remind us as they get on with their job of Getting Rich. But by the same token the post-War spirit is also fading. After Europe had experienced the realities of modern warfare – in which civilians are the principle pawns on the board – it began to turn with some disgust from anything military. So for some fifty years Europe sustained an essentially anti-war culture. Divided into East and West we Europeans contented ourselves for a time with hurling abuse across the barbed wire and barricades. Eventually the East said “enough of this shit” and we in the West assumed our insults must have been more effective, and so got busy stealthily, or not so stealthily, encroaching on the East. Now that our economies have run out of steam a bit we expect, and fear, the enantiodromia, where the East starts encroaching on the West – and like the nostalgia, the disgust at the notion of war has become diluted, so where exactly does that leave us?

In the same news bulletin (fortuitously) as the report on Sir Patrick’s speech, Steve Rosenberg sent a brief additional item from Moscow about the main news, the shooting down, apparently by a Ukrainian missile, of a Russian transport aircraft. The plane was carrying, depending on your standpoint, Ukrainian PoWs, or surface-to-air missiles, or a mixture of the two, or none of the above, ie it was just a cruel Russian psy-op (we don’t approve of cruel psy-ops in the West, we like them to be a bit nice, as Nicola Sturgeon will no doubt testify…. what? you didn’t know the SNP had been targeted by the black ops bunch? Well that just shows how nice a psy-op it was, doesn’t it. Oh, and did you know the Scottish Government had paid a multi-million pound sum to Hamas to let Humza Jousaf’s family escape from Gaza? It’s true, as God’s my judge and for Christ’s sake don’t go believing those ferrety fact-checkers….) Anyway, Rosenberg’s report, which bizarrely began with a clip of the whoop of alarm from the woman who filmed the downing of the plane on her mobile, was about 90 seconds long, and I paused to break it down by sound-bytes, viz: there are the forty seconds of actual report, pretty much repeating what was said in the original news item, minus 2 seconds or so of sound effect – a “Russian military spokesman” saying something in the sinister Russian lingo – then there’s a 14-second “bridge” about how “over at the Russian parliament, MPs were quick to condemn…”, etc  etc; and then some 23 seconds are taken up with Steve reminding us about how we could discount anything said in the Russian parliament and how the whole thing really all started (Russia’s unprovoked invasion etc  etc); then in the 16 seconds remaining there are more sound effects, the moving sound of a – Russian Orthodox presumably – memorial service being performed at the crash site as Steve plays out his report in tones of standard BBC lament. So, apart from the sound effects that’s basically a ratio of 38 seconds of actual reporting to 23 of rather superfluous commentary – unless the BBC is worried that, being habitually distractible, we may have forgotten about the True Origins of the war, in which case obviously it’s not superfluous and we need to be kept focussed on The Truth. The half hour of the Six o’clock News means the items have to be packed in pretty tightly, so my impression from this 90-second piece of drama – and the BBC are, naturally past masters – is that we were being treated to something that can be counted into what feels like an intensifying propaganda campaign, with the standard meme-type reminders of Russia’s “unprovoked” attack, and how we should never be doubting that Russia’s was not a “special military operation” but nothing less than a “full-scale invasion”, albeit with a patently inadequate invasion force, which just shows that the Russians are stupid as well as wicked.

The subtext of Sir Patrick’s speech is pretty obviously that we need to be like Israel, with a powerful enough “citizen army” (don’t call them conscripts!) to deliver tit for tat when threatened – or tit-squared for tat, or indeed tit-on-steroids for tat. But does the current generation of European youngsters seem a likely recruiting-ground? Well, they’ve no interest in history, so that’s a start – but could they be galvanised to a state of war-preparedness? Maybe there’s still a ways to go, but Sir Sanders no doubt puts great trust in the godly army of Persuaders, such as our Steve in Moscow.

It goes almost without saying that we are apparently being trained – stroked – groomed – towards the principle that going to war with a clear conscience outweighs any disgust at the notion of going to war in the first place – forget that old trope that politicians used to bandy about how “democracies don’t go to war”, there are nuances, you see, always nuances.

All in all, while the field still looks pretty neutral for the moment, I dare say the ”Masters of War” will only have to engineer a few atrocities and the whole thing could change. The “Putin’s unprovoked sudden assault on helpless Ukraine” trope may not have quite its original energy (remember, we’re very distractible), and I suspect the new one, “Russia’s anticipated assault on the west”, has yet to prove its effectiveness. But softly-softly, that’s the way, the arms manufacturers are already getting their production lines wiped down and greased up, so that’s a good start: it may be a while before a good-going atrocity gets the whole nation galvanised for “the inevitable”.

What do I think about it all? Well my view is actually that living in a city fucks up your brain, but of course I’m a teuchter. Be that as it may, the obvious way to let off steam when your brain’s fucked up is to trash a few cities, enemies’, your own, really it’s neither here nor there – you can just build ‘em up again, nicer than before and – of course – full of much, much nicer people.  

A Watershed Year

This is an exerpt from a poem I have renamed One of Pythagoras’ Notes and I’m putting the whole thing now on a new Page of this online collection, links to which are somewhere here, above/below, hopefully visible.

An earlier blog, the one about the oboes, was supposed to be an introduction to the elegy-poem for my schoolfriend Graham Drummond, from which the above exerpt is taken; but as people frequently point out, my blogs are so long no-one ever gets to the end of them – which is where I put the actual text of the poem.  So I thought I’d pull it out from under the rubble of my verbiage, and diligently go back to my former practice of putting up poems ten by ten on the “Poems” page of this site, and also see if I can manage to return to my original practice of including a list of contents at the beginning of each set – I don’t know why I stopped being able to do this, either WordPress had gone all bitchy on me or my memory of how to do things had. Hm, tried… failed… Anyway, Graham’s poem is now the first of the new “Seventh Ten” set. Poems – Seventh Ten

A little about the other nine I’ve included in this set – or, mainly, about my 1979 “wake up”. I can’t actually remember when I did Graham’s poem, but I suppose it must have been summer of 1979 or 1980. 1979 did indeed turn out to be a pivotal year for me. We had moved at the end of ‘77 to the Glen of Bellyhack, and a more desolate spot was hard to imagine (we can see the place just across the glen from Cottarton now and it doesn’t seem half as bad as it did then – but then we did have some spectacular winters, and none-too-great summers). I had just finished my PhD, had failed to get a poetry project going with the BBC’s – I don’t know, religious bunch, I suppose, though the kind of poems they were looking for were not religious but rather geared to what you’d call a social commentary kind of direction (not really my bag either, which is maybe why the project came to nothing; I’ll maybe find those poems another day), and had also failed to impress the Cambridge Press with my attempt at writing a book making Friedrich Hoelderlin’s poetry (my PhD subject) “accessible to” (as in dumbed-down for) undergraduate students. What to do next? To avoid the humiliation of returning to the dole (which at the time was indeed a calculated government-sponsored exercise in humiliation, not unlike now when I think of it – though of course they’ve nicied-up the process a bit now for PC’s sake), I tried my hand at translation (German to English, mainly scientific stuff) – and made a grand annual income of – ah memory plays up, it was either £300 or £800, a bit of a joke either way. That was the year Linda referred to as “the year when we lived on potatoes and nettles”, which is a slight exaggeration as we also kept goats, and I spent a large part of the summer making cheeses to store for the winter (toddlers Rachel and Anna – it was still before Ben was born – displayed an alarming taste for the mould that built up on the rinds – the bit we adults would cut off and give to the hens – oh yes, we had hens as well). Anyway when Linda announced that Ben was on his way (obviously, we didn’t know it was Ben, I’m talking euphemistically, the reality was more along oh fuck what are we going to do now? lines) I realised it was time to wake up and get real. Apart from getting a job (three days a week, but I was working our rent at the farm, so three days was just about adequate) I also woke up to the feeling that there was a Poetry Scene somewhere out there, and the National Poetry Competition offered some kingly prizes. So while trying to get a “real job” (that process described tangentially in the poem “Salome Transposed”, in the “Sixth Ten” (Sixth Ten) I thought I’d also see if I couldn’t turn my art into cash (Art Cash, get it?). So a poem was duly produced, somewhat shorter than I was accustomed to writing (40-line limit, but I did long lines, haha), but seemingly it was still way off beam for the poetic requirements of the competition. Anyway the per-poem entry fee wasn’t exorbitant, so I added another three entries (once the plug was out they just kept on coming). So while the first one was “Not Yet Among Schoolchildren” – which slightly refers to a much-admired poem of W B Yeats (“Among Schoolchildren”), it’s not in this set, it’s in the “Fifth Ten” (Fifth Ten), but I’ve included the remaining three competition contenders in this new set – The Deadly Silhouette, Poem for Davie (originally “On the Dam”) and Drumming on the Door. There is also a poem Children Going into School which relates back to “Not Yet Among Schoolchildren” – it was included in my “The Little Ones Growing on” collection, which I might have mentioned in the earlier blog, a home-spun collaboration with artist Alan Tanner and printer Pete Machell, with some illustrative input from our younger kids.

I should add that it was in this same year, 1979, that we had a visit to Bellyhack from Paul and his first wife Diana, when they instructed me in the practical use of the I Ching – a book which had long sat on my shelf making faces at me but which I never actually “used”, being a bit disapproving of such things as divination. Little did I know then that you don’t so much study the I Ching as let the I Ching study you. So anyway, 1979 was a watershed year, and in fact “Not Yet Among Schoolchildren”, written after Paul and Diana’s visit, must have been the first time I used I Ching material in a poem. Five years later I did win a prize in the National Poetry Competition (one of the small ones, but I got onto BBC Radio 3 with it, which doubled the prize money). That was thanks to a calculated, nay cynical, attempt to “market” a poem I’d already written earlier in the year “Holding the Red Mask” (Sixth Ten): I learned that one of the three judges was to be a Jamaican (I think) poet whose work I had heard on the radio (I’m ashamed to say his name escapes me now) and had thought to myself “this guy might like this kind of shit”, so I reckoned my poem would have a thirty-three per cent chance of at least being noticed among the thousands in the first round of judging – and I was right I guess, clever me.  The guy clearly thought it was a gay poem, so I wondered if I’d actually appealed to his taste for the wrong reasons. I may describe how that poem came about some other time. But I still think of my poetic “career” as beginning in ’79 when I decided I’d start entering poetry competitions. I soon got fed up of that milarky, but I’ve done a few other public-type things over the years.

Graham wasn’t the first of my friends to die – and there have been a few since, of course – but the elegy for him was maybe most heartfelt because our friendship went right back to our early teens. A police traffic chappie came into our second or third secondary-year class once and began his talk with “at least one of you here will be killed in a road-crash before you’re thirty”. Way to go with the power of positive thinking…. Sometime I may also look out an earlier poem I wrote after David Sandeman drowned in Loch Tay – once again the year escapes me – and see if it’s worth typing up.

Of the remaining poems in this set, two relate to something that was clearly sparked off by Drumming on the Door: Under the Hunter’s Heel and Phantoms over Davidston (the latter, incidentally, making a parodistic reference to another Yeats classic, “The Wild Swans at Coole”). I must have been in the middle of my “real job” by the time I wrote them, working as a caretaker for Keith Schellenberg, of Isle of Eigg notoriety, who had just acquired the local tower-house (Davidston House) and wanted to restore it a bit – £1.30 per hour seemed to me pretty good terms at the time. I often wonder if the slight anger which seems to lurk in the background of some of the poems was due to working for Keith, as I was frequently angry with him (as, to be fair – nil nisi bonum and all that – he was with me). On the other hand, I note some disparaging references to suburban existence in a few poems, so maybe I was having a look back in anger at part of my own upbringing!

Cock, which I have no memory of writing, must have been around this time too, and presumably relates a bit to my realisation that I didn’t write the “right” sort of poetry, at least for the London-centred BBC scene, and felt a bit pissed off about it. Message to Mother and Son must have been June ’80, as the son in question would have been Ben. And Surgeon to Pyromaniac, clearly a companion to “Pyromaniac to Surgeon” (Sixth Ten), must have been when I was going off on some different tack, where to I can’t at the moment recall.

So, while the first sixty poems I’ve posted on this site were selected pretty much at random, pretty much as they fell out of their folders, I find I’m having a bit of fun now organising them by date of writing, or theme, or such-like criteria; so maybe that means I’m starting to get my life in order – maybe even doing it, like it says in the I Ching, “in fear and trembling” as, I must say, it frequently fills me with the vertiginous sense of looking back down a hill you’ve climbed and which is a lot steeper than you realised – reminds me slightly of Rilke’s poem about being “exposed out on the mountains of the heart”.

A glimpse of Flambards

Today’s choices: sort the books or mend the snowshovel (=gorilla tape) and walk the dogs…..yeah, I’m a bit bored

One of the things I’m doing in these snowbound days – and it needs done, but of course it’s always lowest on the priority list of building jobs and other preparations – patching walls, filling gaps, identifying leaks, testing out flues, none of which can be done (duh) because of the snow – is sorting through my books which (apart from the pile of increasingly raggy-looking charity-shop-or-kindly-donated clothes) account for pretty much all my moveable possessions: I estimate I’ll only have room for about half of them on the shelves planned for my new abode. Because reference libraries have always been my main source of deliberately-sought inspiration I reckoned I should put aside the fiction, to be stored, and I hope eventually shelved, somewhere else – with the exception of a few – dauntingly large – novels I’ve been given as gifts and which I hope I’ll manage to get to when I don’t have other distractions. Since my teens and early twenties I’m afraid I’ve acquainted myself with woefully few novels: most of my other inspiration has come from random things, frequently unimportant-seeming, encountered in “real life”, which is probably why I go about generally in such a haze of intellectual ignorance. Anyway the selection of books, what to shelve and what to store for elsewhere, turns out to be a slow, and pretty painful, process, with many distractions, many glances inside the covers either to get an impression of some unknown author’s style or, quite frequently, to look for a personal dedication – who gave this one to who – as I’ve always liked books that are well scribbled in when given as gifts, whether new or second hand: I particularly like the ones where there’s list of unknown ex-readers, like in your car’s registration document (yes, of course I’ve never run anything except used cars, what did you think).

So I was glad to find a sizeable strip of shelf where I didn’t have to make any harsh choices, because the books were all Maddy’s and so will soon, I hope, be Dundee-bound. Ha – did I realise her reading on serial killers was quite so extensive? Anyway she says she’s turning away from criminology now and is veering more towards a broader spectrum of sociology and psychology, which I can’t deny comes to me with a faint sense of relief! Ah yes, but here was the old collection of her Flambards novels, about which I’m pretty typically ignorant, but my attention for some reason was caught by the blurb on the back jacket of one…. 1912 (ha a hundred years before the scheduled end of the world, folks) – sorry: “1912 – Christina and Will have run away from Flambards together, their heads full of dreams. Will is determined to design and pilot flying machines, and Christina resolves to support him however she can, despite knowing that she will always come second to his passion for planes…..”

Well, I wonder how the story went – did something dreadful happen (as in a Great War) such that Christina was finally forced to understand that while planes may indeed have been Will’s first passion it wasn’t in a way that could ever exclude her; or did she finally toss her head and say, ”well, I’ll just find someone who puts me first, then”. Who knows? I won’t read the book, I’m afraid. I’d love to, I’d love to read them all but sorry, I doubt if I have enough time left – and of course I have to keep writing myself, it’s like breathing. Is that the same as one’s “first passion”? I really couldn’t say. I guess I must have been aware of this issue for a good long while, I can’t remember exactly how long ago it was, that I wrote this little ditty – somewhere back in the mists of youth, cold winter weather is what I remember mainly about the when of it:

From A Year of Undoing
Poem number 4

Make a choice, make a choice, said she
Between me and your poetry
If I gave it up for you, said he
What  would there be left of me?
What sense in the “I love you” I say
If the “I” were all taken away?
Make the choice, make the choice, said she
Between me and your poetry.

– stupid notion I was told, why would a girl ever entertain such a thought if she was in love with you?  – well, as to that, the still-to-be edited (14^th?)version of The Stickman (alias One man and his Crutch) and the only-just-begun Restitution, which are the main projects scheduled for after my return to Coldhome, will continue to endeavour to answer that question. Meanwhile, it links up nicely to another bloglet, about to come….

The Oboes Marching

The proper quote above is actually “whit wid yer mither think, gin she heard the guineas chink / And saw the hautboys marching a’ before you , oh?” and it’s part of the unsuccessful seduction campaign practised on the bonny lass of Fyvie by poor Ned, the Irish Dragoon captain who turns out not to be quite the big-shot he presents himself as. I often wondered what these marching boys looked like – in fact the reference is probably to military fifers, haut-boy simply being French for “high wood”, ie (high pitched?) woodwind, but it’s what has given its name in English to a rather different instrument, the oboe. I can’t really imagine oboes ever sounding shrill enough to make you want to follow them into battle, and of course it’s a closely related instrument, the “English horn” that provides the profoundly melancholy sound of Sibelius’s Swan of Tuonela, describing the black swan floating on the waters of the death-river.

Well, that’s a pretty irrelevant introduction – or not entirely….. I was left wondering, when I blogged recently (got too much time on my hands, with those floods having severely delayed my car’s MoT), why I’d seen fit to add such an irrelevant – local and personal – PS to my learned main script, I mean the reference to the recently-deceased Brian McKenzie. Ok well one explanation is that I spend most of my time bobbing on a sea of irrelevances, one or two of which I try to tie up together, and maybe that’s something poets – and sailors, according to F. Hoelderlin – do: actually he says that sailors, like poets, “bring together the beauties (das Schoene) of the world”; with me it’s just the irrelevances, but same general idea.

 The more likely explanation occurred to me today, and it was (to me at least) yet another fascinating example of how the Mind works. It’s quite simple really: Robbie Bruce’s sawmill, which is where I most recently re-encountered Brian, naturally not knowing he wouldn’t survive long into the New Year, used to be more or less the next-door neighbour to our house at Towiemore, at any rate I would regularly walk past the yard while pondering on the various issues raised by Dune, the movie version of which I mentioned last blog and which we we’d have been watching I suppose on VHS (I think Annie was reading the books too, but they looked way too big for me). I had various “father issues” at the time, if that’s of any interest – nothing like as epic or as world-changing as Paul Atreides’, but decidedly more fraught.

Anyway, so much for that – it was a very personal connection so I guess it really would have been irrelevant to that particular blog, and I just wanted to mention Brian because – well, because I wanted to mention Brian: he had just died, and we always like to say something about the freshly departed.

One of the not-so-freshly departed has been on my mind since before Christmas, largely because this particular memory involves another small string of irrelevances which intrigued me. The person in question is my old school-friend Graham Drummond, after whose death I wrote the poem I’ll include below – a good forty-five years ago, it must have been. Graham was an only child (as in an only surviving child – that comes up in the poem), something of a hothouse flower but who became a virtuoso oboist, and at the time of his death was making inroads into getting a career as a proper pro – I think he was an occasional player in the Scottish National Orchestra, as it was known at the time (it’s become Royal since then for some reason). Anyway the voice of my untimely deceased friend is imagined in the poem as the sound of his oboe, whose tone is indeed often reckoned to be the instrument which has the closest similarity to the human voice. Not mentioned in the poem is the particular piece which to this day I hear as “his voice” – it’s an Adagio I think by Arcangelo Corelli, arranged for the oboe by John Barbarolli, and the first piece I heard him performing, and a pretty heart-wrenching piece of music it is: I must have acquired a CD of it at some stage and given it to my parents, because I found it in their collection after they died and should have it with me now, except that like most things I store somewhere I can’t find it now, so haven’t heard it in a while (what is it that Gandalf says about the innkeeper Barliman Butterbur: “a worthy fellow but a memory like a lumber-room: thing wanted never found” – I should make this clear to my kids, who always want to cast me as Gandalf in their strange LotR fantasies)…..

So the thread that intrigues me is this: it was Graham himself I think who would laugh about the close correspondence between the beginning of Corelli’s exalted piece and a rather less exalted number which was around at the time (ie I suppose from the late ‘fifties), the theme music of a TV show called, I think, The Thompson Family, about which I have no memory apart from the intro music, which I mix up with other theme-musics, such as Dixon of Dock Green, for which there’s absolutely no excuse but also, strangely, The Addams Family, whose theme music actually does have a vague link with the Thompsons. As another case of the sublime meeting the ridiculous, a friend once pointed out irreverently that the first movement of Beethoven’s last piano sonata sounded to him exactly like the Addams Family tune – I’ve never since been able to listen to that one seriously.

What intrigues me here is how I got into this whole train of memory/speculation in the run-up to Christmas. Again it’s fairly simple: Advent is the time of year when lots of traditional Christmas carols run through my head (no point in singing them out loud any more – beyond God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen the only Christmas tunes my younger generation seem to be interested in are “traditional” numbers like I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas or Let It Snow or Fairy Tale in New York, which I understand now ranks as the most played Christmas song.)  Anyway among my Mediaeval faves I still count In Dulci Jubilo, which I really only know in the German version – Good Christian Men Rejoice seems to be the most common English version and a rather pale, more modern, one to my mind. The original was what you call a macaronic, that’s to say parts are in Latin and parts in the vernacular, which must have been fun to sing if you were Mediaeval and a bit starved of entertainment. I don’t know if it’d have been a competitive-type song, such as The Holly and the Ivy, but in this case with “priest and people” trying to out-bawl each other (in Ding-Dong Merrily on High there’s the line “and io-io-io by priest and people sungen”, meaning presumably that io’s are easy enough nonsense words for everyone to sing together regardless of their level of education). 

But I’m, as usual, digressing: what I’m really meaning to point out is that I suddenly realised that a line of In Dulce Jubilo, the one that corresponds with “our hearts’ joy and treasure” in the English (unser Herzens Wonne in the German) is in fact exactly the same musical figure as the third phrase of the Thompson Family tune, only in jig-rhythm rather than march-rhythm. Totally fascinating, yeah what a nerd.

I don’t know what these connections mean, if anything – but I suspect specific musical figures are as much an actual vocabulary as any verbal language, if you get good enough at following them. I was thinking the other day of a hymn from my childhood hymn-singing days – such early musical experiences are, I continue to be convinced, the foundations of my own poetry – which begins “new every morning is the love our waking and uprising prove….”; the first words are linked to a musical figure which quite transparently suggests the descent of a blessing from above – whether that blessing is the sun or the rain or the love of a spouse or of parents is probably neither here nor there – the archetype of that blessing, whatever it is, is hidden in, or at any rate structured into, the musical figure. Sibelius was another great sorcerer here – so many of his tunes, not just that Swan theme, sound as though they’re just about to burst into words.

Anyway here’s my poem, in case you missed it when it was published in my best-selling first slim volume, to rave reviews – well, from the Banffshire Herald at least. The editor of that publication, my esteemed predecessor Mike Collins, clearly thought he would emulate the kind of smart review headlines you get in the Great literary papers: “Drummuir Man Writes Book Of Poetry” was what I got, or something of the sort – but there was front-page treatment of the cool young pen-wielding dude in the black faux-leather jacket, and that seemed a good enough launch to my public career. Ah those long-gone days when the local rag really was the local rag, just like in all those American movies!  Anyway, as I say, here’s the poem. It was originally titled “Elegy”, with the distinctly prissy sub-title for a musician friend of the poet’s youth (a bit objective-ish, detatched and not mentioning any names, see, out of tact, but quite cringeworthy for all that). Nowadays I’d be inclined to title it “One of Pythagoras’ Notes”, and as for the back-story, well I’ve just spilled all the beans on that.

One of Pythagoras’ Notes.



This is beyond the turning of a year

Since you touched me so, sparing a dream-time’s length

The night you died, to bid me good-bye. The air now



Is heavy with forethinking, there

The silver tarnished yarrow, the rust-covered clover,

There the rowan full of fire, a deep unease



Lying on the ground, the wind twitching

Restlessly, grey in its belly, golden

Grass around its maw –



No time for taking hay, so I can think wryly

Among these spinning months and years, how timely

I was last summer, mowing when the grass 



Was full of flower. And looking up, as I was gathering in

My dried harvest, hung in the air

In fine shining rain, between me and the sun



I saw you, indistinct and certain, a

Memory, your spectre, taller than the hilltops

Walking over the grassheads northwards down the glen.



And I thought – why come here, to this part

You stayed so shortly in, it was never your home

And more than mine? But perhaps you are, now,



Indistinct but certainly, in everyone and every place

That has a memory of you, and were

Only hoping for a last glimpse out over



The Firth, where all those years ago

We two watched the breakers leaping Buckie front, and

Then out north and eastwards to the open sea.



With all these years elapsing, between now

And when we were friends, wandering each

With his impatience, or in those far spacious rooms



With their spreading pianos, I

Making music maybe, but you soaring. Indistinct

Now.  Music for me has



Grown the fluid element that must always

Become fixed in words, it is at the root

Of anything spoken, but like home



Left far behind. We would understand each other

Little now, if you had been alive. Conversed

Easily, but the two scions have grown too far apart.



But this will not come between us, now

You have forsworn the logic of time, 

Frozen – pickled, dried, what we would call



An evergreen memory, like hay

You can soak in water to revive the hues

Of cutting-time. – But there’s the fearful thing



Where flowers are thrown up, in dust, at random,

Dancing in the killing air, loose from roots.

That is, a living being is made a thing



Handled and tossed and stowed tight away

In vaulted sheds, from

The raking winter, and the fields outside are empty.



Rest easy. Perhaps you are one of 

Pythagoras’ notes, that like star-points through passing cloud

Pricks out and the is lost under the wide vault;



Perhaps the loss would have been less if

You had reached full fruition, or perhaps more;

And who knows whether more or less if you had followed



The path your brother went, wordless 

All his few days – I hear your mother listening in



The silence, twice over. I hold you close

Drifting, so small, under the vaulted ribs, on



The wide waters in me. I call

You up, you at the back of my words

My immortal twin, I lull you back, whose voice



Piercing sweet, rent out of dried river reeds,

Could not be nearer the human voice, and yet

Is not human, is not language, is music, is music.