All things by immortal power
Near or far
Hiddenly
To each other linked are
That thou canst not stir a flower
Without troubling a star
Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch
No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn
From ‘Stoned Immaculate’ by The Doors.
Wasn’t looking too good but I was feeling real well
From ‘Before They Make Me Run’ by the Rolling Stones. Loosely inserted in the notebook is a flyer for Keith Richards’ ‘Main Offender’ album and tour.
Gonna kill ‘em with kindness
Might stop the blindness
From Eddy Grant’s ‘Kill ’Em with Kindness’.
Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle –
Everything I do is stitched with its colour
W.S. Merwin, paraphrased in Animal Wild.
Surviving the urban crime experience – move on up to the country
From ‘Hill Street Blues,’ the original police procedural.
I thought this was a powerful juxtaposition. The first comprises the final lines from ‘An Open Letter to My Teenage Son’ read to a background of ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’ by Victor Lundberg, an advertising executive, a single which entered the American Top 20 in 1967 (I don’t think the last part of the first sentence even makes sense, the second sentence is a real WTF?) The second is from ‘The Unknown Soldier’ by The Doors, performed on stage by them in the same year. I rate Jim Morrison very highly as a poet. I think that Bob Dylan is one of the greatest poets of our times.
If you are not grateful to a country that gave your father the opportunity to work for his family, to give you the things you’ve had, and you do not feel proud enough to fight to continue in this manner, then I presume the blame for your failure to recognize the true value of your birth right. And I would remind you that your mother will love you no matter what you do because she is a woman. And I love you, too, son, but I also love our country and the principles for which we stand. And if you decide to burn your draft card, then burn your birth certificate at the same time. From that moment on I have no son.
Wait until the war is over
And we’re both a little older
The unknown soldier
Breakfast where the news is read
Television, children fed
Unborn living, living dead
Bullet strikes the helmet’s head
And it’s all over for the unknown soldier
It’s all over for the unknown soldier, uh uh
March!
Company, halt!
Present arms!
Make a grave for the unknown soldier
Nestled in your hollow shoulder
The unknown soldier
I am reminded of the time Ronald Reagan praised Bruce Springsteen and his ‘patriotic’ song ‘Born in the USA’, completely failing to understand what it was actually about. As Springsteen said at the time, “a little learning is a dangerous thing.” Likewise Trump (I can hardly bear to type his name) misunderstanding (actually quite difficult to do) and appropriating Creedence Clearwater Revival’s ‘Fortunate Son.
This, written by a ten-year-old and taken from Sir Ernest Gowers’ Plain Words, never fails to make me smile:
The bird that I am going to write about is the owl. The owl cannot see at all by day and at night is as blind as a bat.
I do not know much about the owl, so I will go on to the beast which I am going to choose. It is the cow. The cow is a mammal. It has six sides — right, left, an upper and below. At the back it has a tail on which hangs a brush. With this it sends the flies away so that they do not fall into the milk. The head is for the purpose of growing horns and so that the mouth can be somewhere. The horns are to butt with, and the mouth is to moo with. Under the cow hangs the milk. It is arranged for milking. When people milk, the milk comes and there is never an end to the supply. How the cow does it I have not yet realised, but it makes more and more. The cow has a fine sense of smell; one can smell it far away. This is the reason for the fresh air in the country.
The man cow is called an ox. It is not a mammal. The cow does not eat much, but what it eats it eats twice, so that it gets enough. When it is hungry it moos, and when it says nothing it is because its inside is all full up with grass.
These are the words from ‘Peace, Perfect Peace’, a beautiful song by Toots and the Maytals:
Peace, perfect peace
I cry for peace in this neighborhood
Oh, love, oh, love, perfect love
I beg you for love in this neighborhood
No water can cool this fire
Only the Lord can save us
I cry for peace (I cry for peace) in this neighborhood (in this neighborhood)
I take a look inside and this is what I see:
We need more love, we need more love in this community
Oh, I take a look inside and this is what I see:
We need more love, we need more love in this community
Peace, (peace, peace) perfect peace (perfect, perfect peace)
I cry for peace (peace) in this neighborhood (in this neighborhood)
Oh, love, (love, love) perfect love (perfect love)
I cry for love (oh, oh) in this neighborhood (in this neighborhood)
No water can cool this fire
Only the Lord can save us
I cry for peace (peace) in this neighborhood (in this neighborhood)
I take a look inside and this is what I see:
Faith can move mountains, only love can set us free
I take a look inside and this is what I see:
We need more love, we need more love in this community
Peace, perfect peace
I cried for peace in this neighborhood
Oh, love, oh, love, perfect love
I cried for love in this neighborhood
This is an excerpt from a letter by A.A. Milne to The Times on behalf of the Children’s Country Holiday Fund (this took me a while, from a photocopy of the original, his hand is not easily decipherable):
It is difficult for us to realise in these days of easy travel that there are children who have never seen the country; difficult for us to see it now through their unaccustomed eyes. [One boy] sums up his holiday in the simple words: “I would have liked to stay in Herefordshire for always.” Who shall be surprised? It is a land, as some of your readers may remember, where “the singing birds fly loose, like the sparrows”; a land where you may hear an owl – (“She means a Howl, that bird with flat eyes”) – and see perhaps a rainbow for the first time. “I stood and gazed at it in amazement” writes a little girl from Bermondsey, where the houses get in the way so, “for I have never seen one before in my life. It was so lovely I could not leave the bridge, nor can I express its beauty.” Yet I think that somehow she has expressed it. “The first night”, writes one boy, “it was so quiet I thought the world had changed”, and another, excited to be going to Wiltshire because his father came from there, says: “He’s been teaching me the language so that I can talk to them when I arrive.” Hereford and Wiltshire, Wiltshire and Hereford – if only one could talk the language, if only one could charter the vessel, what high-sounding worlds to discover, what strange glad voyages to make!
I still find this amusing from the BBC sitcom A Bit of a Do: “You don’t talk about functions like that at functions like this.”
I have also written “£1000/slash” but I have no idea why or what I was trying to say.
I have no attribution for this Buddhist thought:
The jewel is not the lotus, it is the enlightenment which is to be found in the lotus of your mind.
This may have been Confucius:
It is difficult to find a black cat in a dark room – especially if it isn’t there.
Again unattributed:
What are you doing?
I am trying to catch a fly with chopsticks.
Why are you doing that?
Because a man who can catch a fly with chopsticks can accomplish anything.
Have you ever caught one?
Not yet.
Mahatma Gandhi, a major influence on me:
Truth is as hard as adamant and tender as a blossom.
William Harmon, Shirley Jackson et al.:
If you don’t like my peaches, don’t shake my tree.
From the envelope file of mostly my own writings there’s a pretty terrible poem based on the true story of a 1985 policeman’s ball and what happened at midnight. This is the last verse:
The police formed a circle as
Hitler’s speeches started,
With arms raised high,
‘Sieg Heil’ they chanted.
Like most people I suppose, I am fascinated by people who want to become police officers (let alone prison warders). Perhaps, like politicians, anyone who actually wants the job shouldn’t be allowed to apply. My theory is that although many go in with the best of intentions, and by no means all of them are rotten apples, they are dealing much of the time with humanity at its absolute worst. When they know someone is guilty but the CPS won’t prosecute or a jury is hung, it must be incredibly frustrating and that is how they become jaundiced and cynical and their relationship with truth become distorted (“The truth, once divided, divides forever.”) Their eyes often betray at what stage they are in that process. I know one police officer pretty well and warmed to him, but it was very odd to me that when he was in the armed response unit he brought out, at the beginning of a dinner party, the human silhouette target into which he had fired bullets at the range that day. The police and the fire service seem to despise each other – ‘water fairies’ on the one hand and “at least people are pleased to see us when we turn up” on the other. My brother once stared a complaint against British Airways (I have also tried this but it’s pointless, I will certainly never fly with them again under any circumstances) about a sharp piece of ironmongery he found just in time in his on board meal. As a consequence he found himself on the receiving end of silent phone calls and harassment by Heathrow police.
I don’t know what to make of these cartoons – I quite like them but don’t know what my point was.
This poem about a holiday boat trip, ‘Turkish Nights’ definitely errs on the wrong side of pretentious and derivative, but perhaps has its moments.
A thick, woody aroma spices the breeze
A hot friendly wind from the palely phosphorescing moon
Rising while like counterweight
Still fiery settles the sun atop the old man mountains
The dolphin shoots out from the water
Time stops for grace and power like this, as thrice
It arcs its body elegant;
Like lightning, thrusts beside the boat in greeting and forgiveness
And then, at night, the light is dancing,
Darting, glinting quickly on the riplets where the sea
Strokes and soothes the rocky foreshore
And that scent is all-pervading, herbal, mystic and enduring
And even though they are not seen
The fish still colour, stir the ocean, dolphin’s kingdom
Full of danger, and yet calming
Affording hope to those who need it – all humanity.
There’s a letter I had published in Time Out magazine in response to an article about harassment by landlords, ‘When Push Comes to Shove’. In our case we eventually got a court order.
…We, too, have been threatened and suffered for varying lengths of time without water,, electricity, heating, ceilings, stairs and safe access [to our flat in Westbourne Park Villas in London]. I have every sympathy [oddly changed to “empathy by Time Out] with the tenants whose cases you relate, but perhaps they should be grateful that they have not, as yet, been chased down the street by [a man with] a sword – one of the more dramatic moments of our landlord’s campaign (needless to say the police were not interested in this ‘domestic’ incident)…
There’s another poem about a dolphin, too poor to publish here or anywhere, but it is a happy reminder of a week spent in Amble, Northumberland, swimming every day with a wild dolphin, Freddy, who came to the boat without inducement and seemed only to want to play. He was a thirteen foot long bottlenose. When I first got into the water with him for the first time he disappeared and then jumped right over my head, disappeared again then teasingly slid and hid behind me. We connected. One American holidaymaker thought it would be amusing to put a finger in his blowhole. When he next got in, Freddy remembered and rammed his stomach with his beak, hard. If he had wanted to, he could easily have done it so hard as to kill him.
There are other not very good at all poems, one about my first trip to Thailand, but again it evokes happy memories – monkeys at the temple eating calmly from my hand, the Theravada monk sitting “serenely at the centre, Giving benediction”. It is the only time the sheer beauty of the landscape has made me cry and when I left the temple after being blessed by the monk, I was both crying and trembling. He had somehow shared his spiritual calm with me.
Otherwise the poems and jottings tend to comprise self-indulgent navel-gazing but also anti-fascism and anti-capitalist and left-wing sentiments as I increasingly leaned in that direction.
Here’s another one which offers hope, if only to myself:
When only a crescent shines,
Imagine a whole moon.
When the stone of the everyday
Is around your neck
Remember loyalty
When a friend is not like a friend
Dispense with them.
I do not want
to spend my life
cluttered.
I still think that whilst forgiveness is divine there are certain lines which should never be crossed. A long-standing friend crossed it and I cut him out of my life (for the second time as it happens, the first time it was over money which he still owes us, but then there was a rapprochement at my instigation after the death of my very dearest friend Willmie which changed my perceptions). He tried to come back a few years later and I genuinely tried to overcome it, but in the end I couldn’t. Without going into detail he had said something about one of my young children which was simply and utterly unforgivable. When I told (a very few) people about it one or two asked where I had heard about it, to whom had he said it? He said it to me. He was in ‘altered state’ but he can only have done it with the intention to wound and to this day fails to see what he did wrong and has learnt nothing judging by his facebook posts, one of which, if I was the parent of the person involved, I would find extremely concerning.
How sad that so little has changed, so much has got even worse since I wrote this in 1988:
…Meanwhile, the planet, Mother Earth, Gaia, is being savaged and raped with an unprecedented fervour and on an ever-increasing scale. Hundreds of species are in danger of obliteration by man in the name of money and of hatred, decisions as to whether there should be more or fewer nuclear weapons are made by elected men who also happen to own arms factories and/or who wholeheartedly believe in the beneficial effects of a purifying Armageddon…
With some prescient concern I also wrote in despair:
…while the current best-selling book in America is entitled “The Art of Making a Deal”.
I want to swim in unpolluted seas, I said, which has also of course become more of a problem on an epic scale. I was also (and still am) disillusioned by university friends who, the minute they left, became unrecognisable to me, hot in pursuit only of the dollar, their conversations now just streams of numbers, how much they were making. I was missing Manchester and the friendly openness of Mancunians. Back in London I had to remember not to talk to strangers, smile or catch anyone’s eye. When I first got off the train in Manchester when I went up to have a look around, I walked to and waited at a bus stop. When someone made a comment about the pouring rain I was instantly wary, on alert. But it’s Londoners who are strange, hostile, grey-faced and downcast (if you don’t agree, have a look around a Tube carriage). So often I have found that places where I was told to expect hostility for my accent and my class have turned out to be places where I have experiences only warmth and friendliness, like the Welsh valleys, Cardiff after a rugby match (they had beaten England which probably helped) and Newcastle and Glasgow.
There’s a pompous and sarcastic letter to the student magazine, The Mancunian, about the shortcomings of their crosswords. I hope I didn’t send it. This poem, though, I remain proud of. On Friday nights in Manchester a small group of us would go to The Band on the Wall, a music venue I was delighted to revisit only recently to see the reggae band Black Roots – one of the best gigs of my life. Friday night was reggae night and local bands would play. I wrote about my reggae education in Animal Trust. This relates what happened when a couple of plainclothes police appeared and what the DJ did. Marijuana was openly smoked at The Band on the Wall – the air was often thick with it.
A Friday night
The room was filled with marijuana smoke,
Two men in check jackets, cropped hair
Invade,
Conspicuous…
Suddenly new words emerge from
Throbbing bass and tightsoft drums:
‘Drug Squad’ – a song to warn us.
Polythene packets are hastily fumbled
Behind curtains, beneath seats;
Black faces scarcely betray the tension,
White faces are a little whiter.
The beat shifts once more,
The unwelcome strangers have departed,
People are dancing.
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