In a spirit of divine irrelevance, and inspired by Doug's words about Love,
and wanting too to hog some space like a US Marine force visiting a small
Carribbean island, I thought I'd put a piece here which may or may not be
poetry, being yet another thingy thing, but certainly is a something,
whether good or bad I don't know. Some formatting is lost in e-mail, it
should be in a narrow newspaper local affairs report style column, and a few
italics and boldfaces are gone too, but I think its essence is preserved
here, tho' what it has to do with Erminia's naughty bits (whatever they may
be) I really haven't a clue.

Best

Dave



from THE GRIMM'S GARDENS CHRONICLE

     There was great excitement yesterday evening in Much Biding as the
historic market town where once King Edward the First, the Hammer of the
Scots, wept for his dead bride the fair Edwina (sic, Ed.), welcomed a
production of that ever-popular programme Many Questions Any Answers live
from the Great (and horseshoe hung) Hall of the Wakeman's Gables. The event
was chaired by Mr Roger Rogerson, a person of noted personal personality,
while the celebrity panel was comprised of Honarius Honorium, acting
co-ordinator of The Ghost Machine Board, who, it was hoped, would have much
of interest to recount of his adventures whilst (so recently) lost in a
waste-paper bin; Mr Dentigerous Alume-allotment, the controvesial and
red-bearded horticulturist and philumenist; the feminist and fashion editor,
Ms Rosie Thingadawn; and, sensationally, making her first public appearance
since her death, veiled in a discreet blank space, the late WPC Wendy
Grimbold, newly appointed head of intelligence services.
        Mr Rogerson opened the entertainment by remarking on the timeless
and homely (so gently weighed with thatch) attraction of (to name it in
full) Much Biding Little Consequence and reminded the audience that it was
in this very hall, a little over a century ago, that this great institution
(the programme) had first been performed, on the then technology of (he
pronounced it with historical emphasis) ray-dee-oh. Without further ado, he
introduced panelists to audience (as above) and audience to panelists ( a
muttered phrase with his back turned to the crowd). He then requested, nay,
called upon, the First Questioner.

                  THE FIRST QUESTION

    Mr Wilf Sly, of Little Biggin, asked if there was any truth in the
much-touted rumour of the impending installation of a new Economic Drive in
the Central Machinery. Speaking the mind of the Company, Honarious Honorium
assured the audience that no such plan was in hand, that if there were such
an intention the convention of an extra-ordinary general meeting would be
required, that all the 12 principal shareholders would be away on holiday
during August and that installation of such equipment would involve a
considerable sum of external capital and a consequent reduction in public
service power points in Company Booths, thereby greatly reducing that joy of
every ghost-machinist, the national pastime, the use of do-it-yourself.
     Ms Thingadawn, speaking metaphorically, veiled her thoughts in some
remarkable comparisons, scintillating as the night's lights, and, dazzling
the audience with the electric brilliance of her likenesses, concluded by
insisting that every woman should have one. And a new day was to come.
     Red-bearded Dentigerous took issue with that. And this. And something
else again. It was time, he perorated, to light the fuse, and fill our
gardens with red blooms. Like ignitions. It was time, he insisted, to burn
away the dross, the excess, the animal fat, and re-charge the landscape with
a crimson spring. It was time, he declared, for change.
     WPC Grimbold was unavailable for comment, for reasons of security and a
certain personal mortality.
       The audience applauded with professional timing and enthusiasm and Mr
Rogerson was pleased to have settled Mr Sly on that one.

                     QUESTIONABLE TOO

   Despite some curious semi-audible interjections from Mr Sly, who was
courteously ejected by welcoming machines, Roger Rogerson glided
unperturbed, his teeth, invisible to the listener, gleaming, to the next
question and questioner. Junius Oppchurch, of Little Wanting, had anxieties
about Company Artistic Policy - were planning committees obtaining the
maximum returns on indentured labour and was there a direction post
post-modernism?
   Excited, aroused, Ms Thingadawn displayed a sumptuous portfolio of
imaginative transformations, all, she emphasised, like traditional
handicrafts, produced remarkably cheaply in the poor quarters of Third World
ghost machines, so liberating the choosing power of the home consumer and
aiding less developed foreign spectres. She particularly recommended the
rainbow coloured magic of Latin American ghost realities, where the vivid
hues of tropical luxuriance were hewed to the drive of European machines.
Dentigerous Alume-allotment begged pardon both to differ and for his
ignorance here, but, while he was no expert on modern art, for him art lay
in nature, he did know there were limits to resources and surely the
stockpiled museum pieces in Spare Part warehouses could be converted for use
in new machines?
    Honarius Honorium saw merit on both sides but was quietly insistent on
the need for artistic rationalisation and narrative economies. The Board, he
confided, was awaiting a report on Future Artistic Licensing. The urbane
Roger Rogerson, remarking that he was aware of WPC Grimbold's sensitivities
on the subject of future developments, excused her the question and smiled
at the rising of marshalled applause.

                  BEYOND ANY QUESTION

   For our final question, continued the stylish presenter, we have Mrs
Agnus Deus of Whychmead. Mrs Deus, who is (I believe) chair of her local
do-it-yourself society, has a question about the Ghost Machine in the
garden. Here he smiled at the red-bearded horticulturist.
   His smile was, for once, misplaced in its faith as, floating some seven
feet above her seat, the pallid Mrs Deus explained that, as a result of a
severe fatality with a temporal feedback, she had no practical use for her
intended question and wanted to know instead whether or not there was a life
after death. This, she added, would help her greatly in the matter of her
own (questionable) existence. A deathly silence chilled the hall.
Power-consumption on the ghost-grid soared in the rush for heat. Hastily,
the presenter began to remind the audience that the time-honoured
Metaphysical Policy did not allow such debates when the expunged Wendy
Grimbold, hissing like an antique record, deepened to a further shade of
emptiness, and, before the multitude, - Personally speaking, no - , blank
space declared.
   Confusion ran breathless among the crowd, paradox turned this way and
that. Honarius Honorium, shouting above the heads of tumult, told how he (a
former Company Chairman) had been forced to revise his (previous) sceptical
materialism when he (torn to shreds by The Author) had experienced a (for
him) religious experience and that we should all await Friar Economicus's
forthcoming sermon, when, overcharged with latent meanings, the ghost-drive
failed and the hall, the audience and the panel were submerged by the
darkness and failure of power.








----- Original Message -----
From: "Douglas Clark" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Monday, August 13, 2001 11:45 AM
Subject: Re: Erminia's naughty bits


I was puzzling how to answer you so I'll do it with a 1983 poem.
Love has nothing to do with words, it is a meeting of eyes. I think
I try to capture that here. I have so many love poems I dont know
where to choose from, but my instinct chose this one.

A poem is a packet of intelligence which unwraps on the tongue.
There was never anybody who understood love better than Shakespeare.
But Dante was the real thing. And Petrarch. I think this idea of
love came from the Arabs through Sicily. It is the true one.
Now for the pub.



Feasting


I am the shape-maker
electing out of the murmuring voices
assonance and rhythm.
I weave from the singularity of love
triptychs of before and after.
The constant spell amazes me
as I fashion this glottal sympathy.
Never to look back and say it was.
Never to look forward and repeat the question.
It was there in the moonlight
as I brushed a tear from your cheek,
Your eyes lit by Paradise,
as you asked yourself where the rainbow lay.
The lost years of youth burn brightest
in the elation of your calm intelligence;
Absurd before and after.
Trapped together for eternity
by an absence of words,
The eyes, making a mockery of language
at the feast of the soul.
You, so pretty.


Douglas Clark, Bath, England mailto: [log in to unmask]
Lynx: Poetry from Bath .......... http://www.bath.ac.uk/~exxdgdc/lynx.html

On Mon, 13 Aug 2001, Erminia H. Passannanti wrote:

> On Mon, 13 Aug 2001 01:37:16 +0100, Douglas Clark <[log in to unmask]>
> wrote:
>
> >Poetry is about making connections. THe transcendental connection
> >is love. So romantic love is fundamentally sexual. Seems to be.
> >You have to add some quality of language into the recipe.
> >
> >
> >
> >Douglas Clark, Bath, England mailto: [log in to unmask]
> >Lynx: Poetry from Bath ..........
> http://www.bath.ac.uk/~exxdgdc/lynx.html
>
> Romantic love...and sexual reliance.I wonder whether one is ever loved
> in the way one wishes to be loved and for what one is. I have the feeling
> one is the projection of another person's set criteria. One is found and
> selected according to pre-existing regulations of the mind. One at the end
> is never really seen for what one is. One might add that what one really
is
> never certain. Or maybe parents, if one is lucky, can see one as one is.
>
> I am thinking of a way to reply to you, Douglas, with a question.
> Shakespeare's treatment of Andrea Bandello's story of Romeo and Juliet of
> Verona
> has certainly established a strong oppositional link between the
extremist
> way Italians conceive love ( as a collective experience, in history and in
> society , especially through theatre, and the equally extremist way
> English people have developed their ardent conceptions of love and
passions
> in their best genre, the novel, as a typically more private ground. These
> two ways do complete each other in Shakespeare's tragedy. The sexual-
> romantical private
> constituents, I think, were somehow not predominant in Bandello's story
> which was based on
> a kind sociologically didactical issue of one would regulate marriage in
> society and in politic.
> In fact Bandello's story of the two families was already quoted by Dante
> Alighieri in the VI Cantos (verse 106) (Purgatorio) and subjected to the
> political ethos. And Luigi Da Porto recalls the same plot in
> 1524 for a short story which lately was developed by Matteo Bandello into
a
> novel. The content of the novel, which in the Bandello's version was still
> very much informed of political significance for it aimed at being staged
> at the Court of Isabella D'Este, was very shortly adopted by Arthur Brooke
> in 1562, transferred on the English ground only three years before
> Shakespeare rewrote it in his own style and from his own stunning
> perspective of love and passion which incorporated the historical and
> political issue but giving prevalence to the herotic.
>
>
> When one reads Dante's verse or Matteo Bandello's story one is amazed how
> less focused on
> the actual love and sexual attraction between the two young noble children
> of Verona the topic is. In the tradition of Dante's political writing, the
> disastrous love and sexual magnetism related about by
> Bandello was still there mainly to stress the political.
>
> For your surprise , this is how Arthur Brooke prefaced his poemetto about
> Romeo and Juliet in 1562, turning the political into the sexual (a
> sexuality to be loathed and castigated but neverthless given great
> predominance). His introduction reads:
>
> "And to this ende (good Reader) is this tragicall matter written, to
> describe unto thee a coople of vnfortunate louers, thralling themselues to
> vnhonest desire, neglecting the authoritie and advice of parents and
> frendes, conferring their principall counsels with dronken gossyppes, and
> superstitious friers (the naturally fitte instrumentes of vnchastitie)
> attemptyng all aduentures of peryll, for thattaynyng of their wished lust,
> vsing auriculer confession (the kay of whoredome, and treason) for
> furtheraunce of theyr purpose, abusyng the honorable name of lawefull
> mariage, the cloke the shame of stolne contractes, finallye, by all meanes
> of vnhonest lyfe, hastyng to most unhappye deathe."
>
> Therefore, the lesson is : one should marry an Italian, but have a British
> as a lustful lover.
>