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Max a whole pamphlet of snaps treat -P enlightened -----Original Message----- From: Max Richards Sent: Wednesday, September 23, 2015 4:26 PM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: 'Enlightenment' Enlightenment Diderot, Voltaire, and several lesser lights, came to my room in my student days, promising company and ‘enlightenment’. I fancied them, and fancied they’d fancy me. My town, my country, seemed run by sermonizing churchmen and priests; some deferred to the Pope in far-off Rome, with their banning of books, movies advised against. Who was there now to show us how to be enlightened? Oh there was Bertrand Russell, old Bernard Shaw, such a tease - good for a light evening in the drafty hall next to prim St Andrews Church (tolerant Presbyterians there), but Shaw never offended anyone, it seemed. My professors put on Moliere, churchy Eliot, Shakespeare, worthily. A man from England, name of Ronnie, put on Beckett - testing us - two hours of hopelessness, so far as we could tell. He and his cast played up the misery, played down the jokes. Waiting for what? This was all just before t.v kept folk at home turning everything into personalities and showbiz. Ideas, I whispered, freedom! contrariety! possibility! 2 Young David Hume, finding Scotland dour, short of enlightenment, lived for years in France, that mix of light and dark, quietly doubting such old standbys as miracles, and soul and self. OK to the first, second and third troubled me, no thinker. My uncertain student self first met my Edinburgh prof in the new Hume Tower (‘Write on Auden? If you must… he’s stranger than you think.’) - listened hard, leaned back breaking one of his new chairs. It boded ill. The chair yielded up its selfhood, my own quavered, never quite recovered. 3 On his Melbourne campus where he winters briefly, the poet-philosopher acknowledged as we passed, my shy smile shyly. He would not know of my - shall we say? complicity? working to redeem in poetry the body from alienation from its spiritual company. But he the philosopher knew what he was doing. My efforts were thoughtless as could be. He had a grip on Plato and on every century down to today, sorting the complexity, pointing ways forward, moving himself on from his early thin wooden spirituality. 4 In repose it was a face of some grace; slow from brow down her nose he would trace to a place where he’d pause, pursed lips nearing hers, murmuring: ‘is this yours?’ - opening mouth with tongue seeking hers. This awoke in her cheek a slight blush: ‘your moustache - it tickles.’ Her fingers pressed back his whiskers, smilingly tweaked his ear. ‘Don’t disgrace yourself, dear. Not so fast.’ Unfailingly he’d draw back a while, a little while. 5 One at a time each grape found its way from the stem in his hand to his open mouth. Munch and gone. Next! So the bunch green from the greengrocer freshly rinsed refreshed him. Elegant the bare stalk remaining in his hand, like a stick- insect standing many-legged and still, while its prey or enemy is confirmed. Lingering tongue-tastes, syllables, rest, stasis. 6 The bed-sit of Venus! For her brief stopover she needed only some rented place with a good bathroom and a balcony and of course a bed. Once installed she voluptuously sprawled waiting for encounters. Which duly came, homage was paid, tribute exacted, grateful visitors went their various ways, content. Sic transit gloria bed-sit. 7 It looms like a glitch in time, or do I mean ‘borrowed time’? - which we may feel once pressed, we all live on. Shall we ponder the lender? Or make do with the loan, expiry date unknown, nearing that glitch in time. 8 In his tiny cottage in Biggar near the Border, Scotland’s senior poet and contrarian said to me, coughing over the whisky we’d brought him, ‘New Zealand? Ye have poets there, I know. But why imitate Auden? Take the long view. We’re in the nineteen-sixties... the Enlightenment was Scottish - Hume and all that. Light! - you know, don’t you, Goethe’s dying words were Scottish: Mair licht, mair licht!’ Quoting himself as we left: ‘Deep surroondin’ darkness is aye the price o’ licht.’