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KEEP IT UP by D H Lawrence ...
People go on singing when they have no song in them.
People go on talking when they have nothing to say.
People go on walking when they have nowhere to go.
People keep it up, because they daren’t stop.
So here we go round the mulberry bush,
Mulberry bush, mulberry bush!
Here we go round the mulberry bush –
Never having seen a mulberry bush in our lives.
D H Lawrence
NEMESIS (D H Lawrence c 1929)
The Nemesis that awaits our civilization
Is social insanity
Which in the end is always homicidal.
Sanity means the wholeness of the consciousness.
And our society is only part conscious, like an idiot.
If we do not rapidly open all the doors of consciousness
And freshen the putrid little space in which we are cribbed
The sky-blue walls of our unventilated heaven
Will be bright red with blood.
AT LAST (D H Lawrence c 1929)
When things get very bad, they pass beyond tragedy,
And then the only thing we can do is to keep quite still
And guard the last treasure of the soul, our sanity.
Since poor individuals that we are,
If we lose our sanity
we lose that which keeps us individual
distinct from chaos.
But if we lose our sanity …
We can but howl the lugubrious howl of idiots,
The howl of the utterly lost …
Through the empty branches the sky remains.
It is what you have.
Be earth now, and evensong.
Be the ground lying under that sky.
Be modest now, like a thing
ripened until it is real,
so that (she) who began it all
can feel you when (she) reaches for you.
Rilke from his ‘Onto a Vast Plain’.
Written in 1919 but published in 1920, the year my father was born. Today, as Christmas fast approaches, one word stands out for me from WBY’s iconic poem, these last few days: BETHLEHEM!
“And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards BETHLEHEM to be born?
I believe that the Rough Beast arrived in Bethlehem a few weeks ago! A premature birth, so it could be ready to mock, and challenge, the Prince of Peace’s birthday on the 25th. A freakish blood-sucking monster, hell-bent on consummating the Zionist nightmare of 1948.
And sadly, nay, tragically, there will be plenty of Christians, ‘eyeless in Gaza’, this Christmas who will still sing ‘ O little town of Bethlehem, How still we see Thee lie,’ oblivious of the Rough Beast patrolling her ‘dark streets’ searching for more innocent victims.
Yehoshua was a Palestinian Jew, known to us as Jesus – we celebrate his birthday, as the Prince of Peace, on 25 December each year. Born, as he was, under a brutal Roman military occupation, I wonder how we will celebrate his birth THIS coming Christmas.
During Advent – which begins on 3 December – this year I suggest we should think very hard as to how we celebrate this year’s birthday of the Prince of Peace, or we may well be accused of making a mockery of his birth, life and death.
Yehoshua said to let the little children come to him and not to hinder them, for to such belongs the Kingdom of God … “See that you do not despise one of these little ones”.
In a story, Yehoshua ben Yosef quoted the king as saying: ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’
“May God help me be a mother, a sister, and a father to my siblings.” Touching words from a Palestinian girl who lost her parents to the Israeli airstrikes. #Gaza #Israel https://pic.twitter.com/xfvCNXOxeq
Way back in my early twenties (1970s), I remember a young art student – or her mother- giving my mother this sculpture, as a gift. It was pure white at the time. I cannot recall how it ended up in my possession. I wish I knew the name of the student and what she went on to achieve in her life. Our home was in St James Vicarage, Upper Bangor, NW Wales.
Fast forward to my parish in southern Snowdonia or Eryri, Wales. I created a small inter-faith chapel above the garage, next to the Rectory. A building dating back to the 1770s, known as The Granner, because it was a local granary. The garage below housed a large bread oven. I well remember the day I re-discovered the old oven, but that’s another story.’
Only one of the two dozen or so bakeries in Gaza is operational by today.
The sculpture joined numerous religious artefacts, sculptures and paintings within the chapel dedicated to the Divine Feminine, Hagia or Sancta Sophia. Then one afternoon, in the late eighties, tragedy. The building burnt to the ground. Everything gone., including the altar, iconostasis, prayer stools etc. A holocaust, lasting many hours, destroyed everything … well, almost everything.
Having arrived in record time, a fireman’s hose must have hit the balsa wood buddha, immediately soaking it in water, while the fire raged around it. We found it the next day, perched above the rubble. Still soaking wet. Then, working for a local builder, two of his men started clearing the site. As I looked on, from behind the security fence, two items were found. It was as if the lads were engaged in an archaeological dig. Dyfrig found a small silver Holy Communion set, belonging originally to my father, who was also a priest. I had never seen black silver before! I’ll never forget the smile when he handed it to me.
Many shovels later, one of the lads found ‘The Mother and Child, under a pile of dirty wet rubble. No longer pure white, but intact. Not damaged? Of course it was damaged, because it’s purity had gone. Blackened. But not dirty. Maybe it’s a different kind of purity? In a mysterious way, ‘Mother and Child’ felt holy: ‘set-apart’ for a purpose, which is what ‘holy’ means.
Was the baby originally alive or dead? I’ll never know what the young artist or sculptress was thinking of. But the mother is clearly horrified. Traumatized. Did it’s creator become a mother herself? What sort of artist did she become? I will never know.
What I do know is this: fifty years or so later, her sculpture has taken on a new life. It now encapsulates a tragic moment, not just in Gaza but also in the so-called ‘civilized West’, our own government and parliament included: champions of the rule of law, justice and humanitarian care and compassion.
Gaza! 2023! Genocide? Of course it’s not genocide, because our leaders tell us so.
I hope that the young student from Bangor won’t mind if I now give a name to her art work of long ago. I’m calling it ‘The Gaze of Gaza’. It’s not so much that we are looking at ‘them’ (which, of course, we are), but that ‘they’, in their stark horror, are looking at us. Every one of us, including our parliamentarians and religious leaders.
And when Christmas and the festive season arrives in a few weeks, ‘She’ will still be looking at us. ‘They’ will still be ‘gazing’ at us from Gaza, not in admiration but still in horror!
‘The Gaze of Gaza’ by an unknown sculptress around fifty years ago
From New Mexico (Navaho) to Australia’s South Sea Islander community in Northern Queensland and a one-off Greek film – all-round enjoyable stories, with good characters in great locations.
Zahn McClarnon – the son of a Hunkpapa Lakota mother and a father of Irish ancestry.
Angeliki Papoulia – actress and theatre director
Jemmason Power – hails herself from a South Sea Islander heritage.
Late night binge-watching at Oak Tree House. CC is our first Chinese language show, filmed in Taiwan and Beef is a US production created by Korean director Lee Sung Jin – the latter is billed as comedy but bordering on some ‘black comedy bits’ indeed, but there’s no comedy in Copy Cat! Gruesome in parts. Some good twists, though. Good characters in both productions.
CC actors include Hou Yan Xi, Chris Wu and Tuo Chung Hua
Lead roles also included Cammy Chiang and Ko Chia-yen
As for BEEF, well … I hope there is a second series! A ‘mad’ story with great acting all round, especially the chemistry between Amy and Danny. Their performances – 4′ 9″” Ali Wong (I thought she was a comedian before I read up about her) and Steven Teun – earned them widespread critical acclaim and were nominated for Primetime Emmy Awards.
In addition to writing and producing, Ali also wears ‘those glasses’
Just finished .. not just ‘reading’ it but experiencing it, journeying into it … an epic encounter with a truly epic poem. Diolch Matthew. I’ve always been fascinated by the friendship between TSE and Ezra Pound and the latter’s role in the poem.
Matthew was born in Norwich 1971 – he was Poetry Editor at Faber & Faber from 2012 to 2023. His second collection, called ‘Earth House, was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2023 and was longlisted for The Laurel Prize 2023.
The ‘designer’ cover of my 2003 copy of TWL (& Other Poems)
I like this cover – very original. I think Ezra Pound would approve! Vanessa Willoughby: The poem’s final form was heavily influenced by Ezra Pound, who made extensive cuts and revisions to Eliot’s manuscript. Eliot once said of his mentor and friend, who he first met in 1914 in Europe, “Mr. Pound is more responsible for the 20th‐century revolution in poetry than is any other individual.”
T S Eliot: © Estate of T. S. Eliot and reprinted by permission of Faber & Faber Ltd. Ezra Pound: By Ezra Pound, from New Directions Pub. acting as agent, copyright © 2015 by Mary de Rachewiltz and the Estate of Omar S. Pound. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. Berg Collection: © The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature The New York Public Library Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.
If Eliot is the poem’s mother, then perhaps Pound was right to claim the role of obstetrician:
“If you must needs enquire
Know diligent Reader
That on each Occasion
Ezra performed the Caesarean Operation.”
Quote from Ezra Pound’s “Sage Homme,” a poem included in his 24 December 1921, letter to T.S. Eliot celebrating The Waste Land.
Tyler Malone writes: The evidence of Pound’s contributions hasn’t much altered the mythos surrounding the text one way or the other. Some still diminish Pound’s contributions, and others oversell them. Decades after the publication, an English professor in a graduate seminar I took referred to The Waste Land as “the best poem Ezra Pound ever wrote.”
The Fugitive Stag 