My Name is Writ in Fire

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My name is writ in fire. But those who stand

And wait: illiterate, see nothing but The smoke that swirls and coils around the end Of days. They will not see. Their eyes are shut. From under Anmer's mighty hooves would crawl For Abbott's step a wasted victory. An unsurrendered stub: unpunched, unused: A privilege dearly bought, disdained, abused.

Niemoller's words and King's "one day" are not The end of it. For still we seek the source, Of Siloam's balm. The world is overwrought: The master of the Tiger blown off course Within the foul tornado of man's ire. And until then my name is writ in fire. (PDR 2021)

Caveat Lector

Imagine our collective consciousness. Got that? Ok. Now imagine poetry as mycelium that is so pervasive that it isn’t recognised as ‘other’; it is accepted as a part of the whole. If you’re still with me, good. I’m thinking the literary equivalent of the shiny stuff in Avatar. If you choose to read on, it doesn’t get any stranger than that. And, structurally, if you return to this thought at the end, my metaphorical optogenetics might not seem strange at all.

Of the many joys of being an English teacher, Advanced Higher has to be up there near the top. Meeting with minds that want to explore the “realms of gold” with you compensates for some of the less shiny elements. I celebrate my current cohort and fondly recall classes of the past. I consider myself lucky.

Academic study, however, is fraught with danger. There’s a new book out by Jamie Kreimer: “The Wandering Mind - what Medieval Monks tell us about distraction.” I haven’t read it, yet. Amazon or Topping and Co, one of you is about to receive an order. I came across this book on the web while looking for something else. Isn’t that the way of it? I was also led to a site where - if you sign up - you can read digitised versions of texts written by Frange.

Oh, come on! You must have heard about Frange.

One of my favourite galleries in Edinburgh’s National Museum of Scotland growing up was the Egyptian gallery. Then, in the £80-million redevelopment, it was closed for some time. It opened again in 2019, just in time for COVID. Now, again we can visit, and see the writing of Frange.

The expansion of Christianity - its ‘acceptance’ largely due to Constantine’s conversion – led to a change in thinking. Martyrdom, to coin a phrase, fell out of fashion: one no longer had to die to prove one’s piety. So, going to the desert to pray became a kind of non-lethal, self-imposed martyrdom. And the monastic movement was born. c 660AD Frange, a Coptic monk, lived alone inside an old pharaonic tomb (Theban tomb complex TTC3) close to the modern-day Egyptian city of Luxor, where he had moved, or martyred himself, to get peace to work. Sadly, even the life of a hermit wasn’t devoid of distractions. People still invaded other people’s headspace. Frange left behind shards of pottery (ostracon) that show he was in touch with over 70 correspondents. The soot-based ink remains intensely vivid a millennium and-a-half after he applied it. Frange had to deal with requests from people asking to have their livestock and children blessed (he was a monk after all). He asked to borrow books and invited people to visit. But sometimes he wrote of his wish to be left alone so that he could get on with his work without distraction.

Shards of pottery I lack. However, there’s a distinct possibility that future generations would wonder at the half-formed thoughts that proliferate in the Notes app on my phone. And don’t forget about the browser history: herbs which kill, the amount of lye required to dissolve a human body (about 100 lbs), Llyr/Lir?, Hildegard of Bingen, 432 Hz, the golden frequency of DNA, Epona, Deirdre , When did common era replace AD? (Germany 17th C, English 18th), Mrs Malaprop . . .

Dickens the plagiarist: Pliny (the younger c. 61AD -c.112) wrote a ghost story about being pursued by a ghost enrobed in chains, rattling them and admonishing him. all down the tunnels created by the gregarious plant-eating mammal of the internet.

There’s a fabulous sequence in the film “Oh! What a Lovely War (1969) where the glamorous and beautiful Maggie Smith, siren-like, entices lusty young men to sign up. As they climb the steps at the side of the stage, we move to close-up and see how thick her makeup is, how the glamor created by the footlights dissolves too late, revealing the tired, hardworking actress simply playing a role. By then, of course, the signature is on the line just like their lives.

The beautiful Maggie Smith (35) is the click bait of the Great War.

Cue Wilfred Owen’s sonnet. This year we’ve not looked at “1914”; we’re studying another. What is it to be a poet? How do I want to be remembered? Owen meets Rossetti meets Keats.

We had discussed six degrees of separation in class as we examined connections between the poems and poets we are studying. And this is what took me down this particular rabbit hole.

Victorian sensibilities contrasted with Elizabethan ones, measured against ours? How does context and culture affect our reading of Shakespeare or Keats? What does that mean for Owen, who wrote his “To my friend - with an identity disc” while considering sonnets by Keats and Shakespeare?

Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol” a work - in prose he noted - which captured the zeitgeist of the early Victorian revival of Christmas festivities, is probably responsible for a lot of what we think of as “tradition.”

Dickens is not remembered as a poet although he would have thought of himself as one.

The pure, the bright, the beautiful That stirred our hearts in youth, The impulses to wordless prayer, The streams of love and truth, The longing after something lost, The spirit's yearning cry, The striving after better hopes - These things can never die.

There is the human condition.

Dickens the plagiarist: Pliny (the younger c. 61AD -c.112) told a ghost story about being pursued by a ghost enrobed in chains, rattling them and admonishing him.

Pliny, while not writing to enquire of Emperor Trajan what to do about these pesky Christians, wrote a story about a proto-Marley.

And a learner said this week the immortal words, “I need a humanity to get in to university.” We also talked about the fact that we have Milton to thank for the Apple in the Adam and Eve story. (Obviously, everyone knew already that until fairly recently, linguistically, anything that was not a berry was known by the word “fruit”, and that the texts from which our bible was translated - from whichever language- all have the Tree of Knowledge being the one they were not to eat from - apple doesn’t come in to it.)

Which led us back to the apple of Aphrodite, and Marlowe’s “Was this the Face that Launched a Thousand Ships?” with which we had begun the course. Although that poem appears in his play “The Tragical History of Dr Faustus” (1604), that particular deal with the devil crystalised that popular view of Helen – poor woman who, millennia after Troy, is damned yet, beautiful but dooming all around her. To us in class, “Leda and the Swan” supplied us a context whereby the gods muck up whatever lofty towers of civilisation we build, whatever heights we aspire to. (And BTW, Yeats’s theory of the bi-millennial cycle of civilisation should not be forgotten.)

We spoke of poetry as being an examination of the human condition. Empires rise and fall but what we worry about, what we feel passionate about, what we yearn for does not change. What the Dickens? Poetry as catharsis. For whom? Poet? Reader?

Which are your favourite sonnets? Sonnets are like soup. I love soup. I love Heinz tomato soup, comforting hug in a bowl; but not for every meal. Sometimes French onion hits the spot, or hot and sour, Iain’s mum’s chicken broth, sometimes mulligatawny, ooh and Cullen Skink. And so it goes.

Some have resonances, poems and soup, that defy explanation. Why do you like it? I just do.

Owen’s “to my friend - with an identity disc” has one of the finest closing couplets I have encountered, but then so does Shakespeare’s sonnet 65. Vichyssoise anyone?

I cannot define what makes Lowry more than a child-like naïve dauber. But I recognise that he is. One of his paintings shows the Pulteneytown’s black steps at Wick harbour. Does that scene of familiarity from my childhood impact how I see any of his paintings? Does knowing about Van Gough’s troubled life make me see the starry night differently? How much does Tchaikovsky’s biography affect how his music aches in my chest? I know little about Bruch but his Scottish Fantasy thrills in my veins. Is it the Scottishness? Russian Orthodox chanting reaches deep within; I understand not a word but it resonates somewhere, and this despite the fact that (DNA search pending) I am not Russian.

Do we respond to art with our heads? I don’t think so.

The burning question of the day is whether Edna St Vincent Millay had read “Wuthering Heights” before she wrote sonnet 43. Both feature ghosts tapping on windows, although one is a departed soul and other tappers are unremembered lovers. Unremembered is so much kinder than forgotten. And it is “unremembered lads” that she writes of, so the Pulitzer Prize winner is not exclusively lesbian.

There are two “preferred” readings of “What Lips my Lips have Kissed”, one of which is kinder to Millay than the other. It was remarked at the time that, for all her forwards thinking - seeking equal rights for women and radical ideas like that - this child of the Roaring Twenties - for all her debauchery, Millay liked the traditional Petrarchan sonnet form. Whichever reading works for you, the poem is exquisite. The sestet is one beautiful melancholic sentence. It’s true that its impact without the octet is lessened, but, boy, is it sweet. And that’s how sonnets do their thing: they take a thought and explode it in our minds. (Owen and Shakespeare have their couplets, Millay her sestet.) Keats’s “When I have fears” is all one beautifully crafted sentence. Although Shakespeare’s sonnet 104 has a closing couplet, it zingeth not. (Get me being all judgy about Shakespeare!) Millay’s faded recollections of past lovers, echoes, I believe, with anyone who has loved or dreamed about what it is to love.

Margaret Atwood has something to say about love, too.

Variations on the Word Love

This is a word we use to plug holes with. It’s the right size for those warm blanks in speech, for those red heart- shaped vacancies on the page that look nothing like real hearts. Add lace and you can sell it.

Atwood is no Shakespeare, nor a Millay; however, there’s plenty of zing there!

Edwin Morgan once told me poetry is dangerously ephemeral. His poem “Floating off to Timor” (1969) was written as an intimate (erotic) love poem about an escape to an exotic paradise, where the balcony of a Glasgow high rise is transmuted to a balsawood raft. But the world is no lover of poetry and ruined it. The violence which erupted in 1999 brought quite a different view of Timor-Leste into public consciousness. Morgan was, typically, sanguine: “I know what I meant when I wrote it,” he told me. “Once it is published, it isn’t up to me anymore.” The beautiful is corrupted and made ugly, ‘twas ever thus: “unless this miracle have might,” says Shakespeare. No such redemption for Timor.

I recently finished the novel “Russian Sleeper Cell” by Nathan Monk; he is a dyslexic writer, (not that that matters one jot - and that’s far from the most interesting thing about him). I’d like to meet him. I think we’d get on. I’d be nervous about meeting Owen and Keats. I don’t think Shakespeare would notice me since I’m neither fair nor a youth. Millay? I can see us getting drunk together. Does Nathan Monk drink? Nevertheless, I loved his book. It was one where, after a page or two - and the blood-halo - I forgot I was reading and just became immersed in his world. I love when that happens. When time doesn’t so much stop as stop mattering and you dive in and swim in the universe created by the author. I’d claim it was a dystopian world if it weren’t so blastingly contemporaneous.

What’s the difference between a rebel and a revolutionary? Is it merely a matter of how much inconvenience they cause?

Writing in 1821 (though published later) Percy Bysshe Shelley said, in his "Defence of Poetry" that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” It was the unfairness of his world, the injustice, that made him write after the Peterloo massacre of 1819 - 18 deaths and over 700 injured - about what he saw as the oppression of the working classes.

“Ozymandias” - a commentary on contemporary events, dashed off in an evening, leaving little doubt about what the poet thinks of those who flex their muscles so that everyone knows how impressive and important they are. Shelley’s political views brought suspicion and, several times, he was under government surveillance. A great deal of his political writing was published carefully or posthumously for fear of prosecution. “Lions led by donkeys” isn’t one of his lines but it could easily be.

Has anyone read “Seventy Two Virgins”? I haven’t and I don’t intend to: “nothing besides remains”

How many of us would know the writer C.3.3? A crypto-pseudonym, a penitentiary name in secular and ecclesiastical sense.

Poetry is dangerous. Knowledge is dangerous. And, without even realising it, we are back in Genesis, though this time with Rossetti again and “A Daughter of Eve.” Biblically, it wasn’t strictly the devil that tempted Adam, it was Eve who succumbed first and then took Adam with her. The entire fall from grace lands on her. Even in the New Testament, Paul advises that, essentially, women should remain quiet and that men, sensibly, should not listen to them if they do speak up. But here, too, is contradiction. His early writings extol the virtues of women - even, and especially, as apostles. It’s later, when they’re not dressed appropriately and are offering unsought opinions in churches, that he wants them to quiet down. Though not a theologian, I would submit that it is entirely plausible that Paul - addressing factionalism in Corinth - bade the women be quiet because that was the quickest way to resolve the problem. If they didn’t have women to argue with, the men would also cease their disagreements and pay proper attention to their worship.

There are places in the world today where women are being denied education precisely because education changes you, gives a voice, encourages discourse. That’s how afraid the Afghani Taliban are! Really? I wonder sometimes if, after the expansion of thought and understanding, after the flourishing of critical thinking and art and culture and free speech, after every measure of civilisation that matters, we are due to experience a big bang in reverse. Never mind the thought that one EMP and it’s back to the dark ages. I recently researched how to make ink from scratch so, if the apocalypse arrives, I continue writing. And, who knows? If I resort to nailing missives on doorways in the town square, my readership might even rise! But I'd not likely make it into Chamber sStreet's hallowed halls for at least another 1500 years.

Most of what Sappho wrote was destroyed by a church that disapproved of her and of what she wrote. C.3.3 Angelou, Aristophanes, Baldwin, Farouk. . . It would seem that ideas contrary to the prevailing accepted wisdom are still dangerous; the status quo must be maintained at all cost. Poets continue to be mad, bad, and dangerous to know. There must be something there, however, that keeps readers and thinkers returning moth-like to the flames these thinkers and scribblers ignite.

Of course, he adds quickly, before being burned as a heretic (allowing that poetry - and all good writing- touches us spiritually if not exactly religiously) not all of these ideas have been delved into fully with my Advanced Higher class - they are impressionable young minds after all - but the concepts have been touched on. One of my learners said the other day that the description of the yobs in “at Marsden Bay” was one of the most disturbing things they had ever read. It is not that the description is particularly graphic but in the impact of Peter Readings’ words in our minds that the dark magic happens.

If “ ‘hope’ is the thing with feathers/ that perches on the soul,” as Emily Dickinson posits, then all is good. Even if another of my learners doesn’t, like Gray Crosbie, go on to make a living as a wordsmith, I know, at least, there’s a small colony growing over the years that will continue to devour and savour the words of those who do.