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.’
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