Day: September 21, 2018

The rhythm  of the world

DSCF0113DSCF0116Quite a miracle this morning.
I  just missed the bus
Well,I thought I can sit  down for 15  minutes but even before I reahed the stop
I saw another one coming.
So I held my hand out and they let me on
I was listening to a woman in the Coffee Shop then I felt a  bit odd so I decided I had had some exercise  and sunshine and the bookshop was not  inviting
I went to the bus stop and saw my bus waas due in one minute!
I was whirled up into this  chariot of fire and here I am back home wondering what went so right today.
I know it’s chance but some days it’s all one way and others it’s like this
I call it “walking in tune with the rhythm  of the world” or in this case
Moving in rhythm with the buses of the city.

N

Stan’s new adventure

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The wheelie bins and Stan’s adventures therein

Stan was in his front garden polishing the wheelie bins with lavender wax polish.
He was not very happy as the garden was only 10 feet by 12. so the huge wheelie bins ruined it.When he got to the third one the lid popped open and out jumped his next door neighbour “Adulterous Annie”.

Hello,Stan” she whispered.”Where’s Mary now ?”
“Why?”Stan muttered into the back of her neck which he licked as he like her salty taste.
“I was thinking,these bins are so big,we could both get inside one.It would make a change!”.
“What a strange idea” he replied philosophically.however age was no bstacle where love was involved, if you catch my drifting between the lines.
Soon Stan and Anne were in the big green recycling bin.Stan being 81 had shrunk somewhat so he took up less space than Annie did.He allowed her to kiss his left eyelid.What a lovely feeling.

Alas, all too soon,as they say, they heard Mary’s bicycle bell.She was getting faster amd faster.As she wheeled her bike up the 30 yard long front path to the porch she heard murmurings and mutters,

She lifted up the green plastic lid and saw the two lovers covered in cuttings from the privet hedge.
“What the bleedin’hell are you doing in there?”she shouted mellifluously.
Well,it’s hard to explain,……………but Stan was wondering about a green funeral” Anne said mischievously.

“Funeral ,my hat!” Mary said coldly.”Get out at once”
“Don’t speak to me like that” Stan beseeched her brazenly.
“Well,it’s a shock to find your husband in the bin with another woman!”
“Wouldn’t it be more of a shock if he was in the bin with a man,or even a sheep?”
“Schmann or Schwommann,sheep,,it’s immaterial.
“Hurry,get out,quickly before the school exit time.what will all the mums think as they go by?”
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But poor Stan could not get out,He was stuck.Oh,my,what an odd phrase.
“Have you got your mobile on you?”
“Yes,it’s here in my bag.
“You’d better call 999”
“What a brilliant idea!”
Soon Dave the paramedic arrived and ran into the garden
Mary showed him Stan’s situation.

Ever resourceful ,Dave was not bothered though the NHS budget might be getting cut.
He tied some rope round Stan’s waist and between the three of them and Emile the cat and his friend Elizabeth, they managed to haul Stan out.

Annie stood weeping with shame.Her silvery blue eyeshadow was beginning to run mixed with tears and black water soluble mascara from Chanel of Paris and London. Her new coral lipstick from Clinique was not as non-allergenic as she hope.
Never mind,it gave her lips that bee stung look that many men admire.It reminded Stan of his boyhood days playing near High Force Waterfalls in upper Teesdale….Teesdale ,still an undiscovered and undervalued part of England
,Contact the English Touring Board for more information. Holiday Loans available from Thwaites of Stockton and Darlington at only 1% interest.

Mary gave Annie a large Kleenex tissue,
“Come indoors,honey, and I’ll make you some Ceylon tea.It’s been the most thrilling event of my entire life and I’ve photographed you with my new Nokia camera phone
[Prices available on request from The Catphone Warehouse,Teesside,Northern England,comes in pink and pink and…pink?How I love pink!]
I’m going to send some to the local paper.

Stan staggered upstairs covered in bits of privet ,lettuce and cabbage hearts, and carrot tops,not to mention a few dozen banana skins and a few potato peelings.
What an afternoon.
Please contact the society for the care and protection of vegetables if you wish to make a complaint about this story.}
“That’s the last time I climb into a  green wheelie bin”,he thought.
“Next time we’ll use the cardboard and newspaper wheelie bin” he proclaimed to the mouse in the bathroom
And we’re all envious!

All photos by Katherine

The cat that bit, the black dog and its bark

The unconscious is  the home of image stark
The faces of our  love and of our hate
The holy, the important  and the dark

 

The cat that bit, the black dog with wild barks,
The bills ,the charge, the  passive, irritate
The unconscious is  the cave of image stark

 

The Northern moors the heather and the lark
Old letters torn up when they came  too late
The holy, the important , the deep dark

 

The marvelled fire, the glowing light, the spark
The holy place immune from every State
The unconscious ,oh  the home of image stark

Here  too dwell envy and   malicious hearts
Yet in that space we  must a soul create
The holy and its candles light the dark

Time has gone, there is no day or date
We are never early or too late
The unconscious lives,  the home of image stark
The holy, the  divided , glossy dark

 

Shyness is egotism?

DSCF0115“Shyness is just egotism out of its depth,” Penelope Keith once told an interviewer – a line the writer Sadie Stein credits with curing her own shyness. “For some reason, the unequivocal harshness of that quote was what I needed,” Stein wrote. “OK, I thought… No one is looking at you; to think they are is the worst form of solipsism.”

 

 

The later poems of Auden

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/m/mendelson-auden.html?scp=28&sq=father%2527s+day+gift&st=cse

 

This is  an extract

Demon or Gift

In his first days in New York Auden felt a new sense of liberation and power. He arrived in the harbor with Christopher Isherwood on 26 January 1939, in the dead of winter, while a light snow disfigured the public statues. During their voyage, he and Isherwood had spoken aloud for the first time of their disaffection with the mass political movements they had hoped to serve with their poetry and plays. Three days after their arrival, the news came that W. B. Yeats had died at seventy-three. Auden, who was not yet thirty-two, had left England with the half-formed resolution that he would begin his career anew in a new country. He now wrote a memorable and audacious poem on the death of Yeats in which he proclaimed the rebirth of poetry and foresaw in the heroic labors of a living poet the renewal of the world.

Two ideas of poetry contend against each other in “In Memory of W. B. Yeats.” The opening section, with its solemn, meditative, unrhymed verse paragraphs, acknowledges that the most a poet can achieve in the world is to be remembered by his admirers. The closing section, with its drumbeat stanzas and soaring visionary rhetoric, celebrates poetic language as a force more powerful than time or death, and glorifies the poet as a source of sustenance, healing, and rejoicing. The closing argument wins this debate, but the ironies and doubts insinuated by the opening one remain unanswered.

The first published version of the poem drew an absolute contrast between the dying impotence of the poet and the reviving power of verse. This version—it appeared in The New Republic, 8 March 1939—was not yet the poem familiar from Auden’s books: the opening and closing sections had almost reached their final form, but the quietly discursive middle section, where “poetry makes nothing happen” and “Ireland has her madness and her weather still,” had not yet been written.

The opening section transforms traditional elegy into a bleak new mode:

He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the air-ports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.

The metaphors point to a world where facts may be counted or measured or reported in news bulletins, where neither poetry nor metaphor is any use. In English elegies, until Auden wrote this one, nature itself mourned the dead while an exclamatory “O” announced the personal grief of the elegist. In Milton’s “Lycidas,” for example:”