JULY: Ripe Moon (San Juan)

The Gormless Public

Throughout the Central Belt of Scotland in the early summer months, a plethora of out-door runs and races takes place; everything from Marathons to Moonwalks. The latter of these suits the subject of this year’s moon-theme: the Moonwalk is an event that raises money and awareness for and of breast cancer. Competitors wander through the night dressed in pink brassieres (mostly over their clothes – it can be chilly even at this time of the year) around the streets of Edinburgh. To illustrate, here’s a picture of Antony Gormley’s latest installation sporting a pink bikini… which brings me onto the subject of this month’s rant.

What’s the big idea of announcing in the news and on the radio the unveiling of a new Edinburgh installation by one of the great exponents of Public Art and then, not telling the public when or where to find him? Having spotted earlier this month a couple of the six figures, and recognised them instantly as Gormley, I was pleased to hear the news one morning on Radio 3 that the man himself was in town. Irritatingly, there was no information – not even on the world-wide-web – on where he could be found, so I jumped on my trusty orange bicycle and went to search out the elusive truth.

How foolish of me to think that a press conference was for anyone other than the self-aggrandising media, a few of the artistic elite and one random fan of Gormley’s work who having, by chance, caught up with this private party along the Waters of Leith enjoyed meeting and chatting with him, shared stories of Edinburgh, was bought a cream bun from a bakery in Canonmills. The private party strolled all the way to the foot of the Waters to marvel that the installation tucked behind the soulless Ocean Terminal Shopping Centre had been doused overnight with seagull shit!

Unfortunately, this random fan was not me: he was a van driver who, passing by the Modern Art Gallery, heard the news on his radio and, on enquiring, found himself at the right place at more or less the right time. I found him later, looking at the statue sunk into the pavement just by the zebra crossing between the Modern and Dean Galleries, and he told me, without gloating, that he spent the entire morning with the artist. He might not have made many deliveries that day, but this ordinary, pleasant and affable man was genuinely struck by how the Great Gormley was, equally, ordinary, pleasant and affable.


Arguably, Antony Gormley’s method could be described as ‘Realist.’ Scholars of English Literature will be told that the Realist Novel began with the likes of Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, even Charles Dickens; before these ‘new’ types of book were romances, allegories, fables, the Epic and other genres. This month’s poem makes a bold statement: claiming that somewhere between the Old and New Testament, something important happened that changed the concept of Truth forever, and sowed the seeds of what was to become The Novel.

The Gospel stories, about one extraordinary man, retold by those who to greater or lesser extent knew what happened, are presented in such a way that intelligent people who read with an open mind can interpret, enjoy, learn and possibly, live by them. ‘Realism’ is not the same as ‘realisticism.’ If we read all the Biblical myths as true stories, we relegate reality to fantasy-land. But if we read them as essential truths about the relationship between our selves and things of the deep, spiritual and infinite life-force that some call God, we come closer to understanding our very human condition.

Now I’m no evangelist – Heaven forfend! – but I must openly (okay, anonymously) commend any person to read the Gospel Truths with an open mind and ignore the closed, agenda-driven, spurious and mendacious claims of the media. You might prefer, perhaps, the didactic happy-ever-after stories of Jane Austen, or the gritty realism of our greatest film-makers: Ken Loach, Mike Leigh, or Michael Haneke. Better still, put on your best pink bra and go and visit Gateshead, Winchester Cathedral, Crosby Beach or the Waters of Leith and see for yourself, humanity in all its grandeur and humility.

Moon Phases, July 2010

Last Quarter – July 4, 14:35
New Moon – July 11, 19:40
First Quarter – July 18, 10:11
Full Moon – July 26, 01:37

JULY: Ripe Moon (San Juan)

Brer

For all the Brer Creatures
born out of barreness,
Crafted and grafted upon the mind's eye,

Sisters of Myth,
the eternal fraternities
link the bright earth to the night's dark sky.

Vicarious fictions
estranged fecundations of
human distended hyperbole

which singers and dreamers
and story-tellers create
to divert us from outer reality.

And what is truth (the Bible inquires)?
Adam himself evolved from a void,
and Eve a mere rib,

whose robbery Adam renegues to this day;
Hannah sang the same jubilant song
which Mary, mere handmaiden, magnified;

Ancient Elizabeth traced her relation
to Sarah, whose God-opened womb
housed the seed of our forefathers,

Forever and ever conceived in
immaculate miracles, bound
by unshriven sororel endeavours.

Who are the creators?
Blyton gave birth to a
fabulous family of 'creeturs'

she stole from the great Uncle Remus,
himself a mere mouthpiece
for some other orator;

And Aesop, the Father of Fabulists,
collected his stories
according to one simple truth:

There can be no Fables with humans alone.

Abstract, imagined, exaggerated,
the primitive beasts provide
the analogous truths of the ancient tales.

Enid Blyton, whose genus
the Brothers Grimm shared, was
not so barren it seemed;

Nor Dogdeson, Lear, Graham, Potter or Milne:
Trapped in regression, they all knew
The existential story-tellers' truth:

There can be no good fairy tale without humans.

Whether Adam or Aesop,
Carroll or Grimm,
La Fontaine or Reynard the Fox,

Uncle Remus' or Blyton's brothers:
are not all stories pure fiction?
Or the yearning for purification?

Not so, since all the Brer Creatures,
are but the seeds of creative unconscious,
ripened by the moon's dark side.

So what of the Bible (truth inquires)?
Signs and symbols, birds and beasts,
primitive pictures in preference to man,

’til One pre-empted truisms' pact:
what lies between Old and New
exists between fiction and fact;

no fairy tale hero or fantasy-land,
He incited something quite modern.
And called it 'novel'

JUNE: Flower Moon (San Ildefonso)

Unless I’m very much mistaken, the road-sign alerting drivers to the possibility of on-coming cattle is usually depicted by a cow. But there’s one nearby a certain scientific institute on the outskirts of Edinburgh with a picture of a sheep. One might assume its name is Dolly – or Polly or Tracey or any other of her scientifically-constructed sisters.

You won’t see Dolly grazing by the roadside next time you visit Roslin: she died in 2003, suffering from arthritis – unusual for a 6½ year-old sheep (or was she 12?). Now stuffed, she revolves on a plinth in the National Museum of Scotland, amid stories of Prometea the ‘horse’ (and its identical twin and mother, Stella Cometa) and other ever-hopeful clones-to-be, Thylacine, and (a little longer in tooth and tusk) the Woolly Mammoth.

It would be fun to think that we, as Spielberg suggested, could clone bits of DNA, but hard luck, time, and other thieves have not preserved the Jurassic amber so well. Yet, we have legend, lore and myth: why else is the Phoenix such an uplifting tale! Heaven knows, it makes more sense than the resurrection-myth purported by certain religions.

My sister once wrote out, as a calligraphy exercise, a passage attributed to Chief Seattle of the Dwarmish Tribe, about the everlasting presence of his people long after the white man has wiped them out. It seems there is more truth in myth than vice versa. As Elaine Feinstein (whose poem, ‘June’ I allude to below) says, ‘The dead are strong.’





























How true.

Moon Phases, June 2010

Last Quarter – June 4, 22:13
New Moon – June 12, 11:15
First Quarter – June 19, 04:29
Full Moon – June 26, 11:30


Phoenix

Beneath the Flower Moon the Phoenix rises.
From the dust of winter's ashes, from the clay?
A miracle as old as Lazarus, Persephone;
Flaring flower of a dried-out cactus in June.

The Phoenix has a handy device
above his counterpart amalgamates,
The Griffin, the Dragon, the cockatrice,
The Gryphon, the Quagga, the Wyvern, the Minotaur,
Thylacine the Tasmanian Wolf et al: ice
couldn't preserve the Unicorn with its spiral horn,
Yet the Phoenix, tried seven times in the fire,
continues, continues to rise.

Surely these pieces are purely inventions
played out as if on some chequered board
according to systems of human convention
- abstraction and emotion hold little regard
for the laws of nature, reality, fact nor fiction.

Attempting to ape the animals we re-create Eden,
Design a warped Utopia, Atlantis or Shangri-La:
Weird combinations, grafted vines or paper roses,
Genetically modified, cloned sheep, test-tube mice,
Imaged, molded or morphed like a child's cartoon;
Plasticine, proven dough, clay corrupted and fired.

We cannot be foxier than the fox; the proud
Heraldic Lion is rampantly so (- two legs good,
the stubborn symbols, angry defensive arrogance),
Yet we learn the basic rules, throw the dice,
Compose our own music to join in the dance.

The Wolf lies down with the Lamb, the Cow and Bear
The Leopard and Kid, Lion and Calf and all the Brer
Creatures: cannot all of them jump over the moon?
How can the Infant jump over the Cockatrice' nest?

Because it is not written, but invented; allowed to rise,
the Phoenix will follow the cycle of bloom:
Flowering, fruiting, decomposed, rotted and hewn
to be cast onto Autumn's conspiratorial pyre,
Only to put, once again, its septennial trick to the test.

One thing is sure: come hell or high water, fair wind
or foul, high noon, full moon, November or June,
When the last red man shall have perished, and the
Memory of tribes become a myth among white men,
- on reflection, nothing but a change of worlds - the
Phoenix will flourish long after its author's demise.

MAY: Corn-planting Moon

Far be it for me to make any kind of party-political comment on this blog – reserved purely for poetry, pictures and polemic – except to say that, yes, my last entry on all things green coincided with a General Election. Potentially this is the best night’s TV-watching (bar the Eurovision Song Contest… no, actually, scrap that: without Wogan, it is like, well, Election Night without Peter Snow!)

I spent the long night with some friends who, far from lasting until the Portillo Moment (or the Opik Defeat) flaked out long before the Green Dawn (I mean, when the hippies broke into the Pavilion, not when the Yuppies had a picnic in the Park.) For every silver lining…

This month’s full-moon poem may be more, or less, political – depending on your point of view. It sort of answers the question I get asked about vegetarianism: why I eschew something that has been created purely for my pleasure without any recourse to that creature’s or person’s dignity or humanity. Far be it from me: let poetry legislate.

Moon Phases, May 2010
Last Quarter – May 6, 04:15
New Moon – May 14, 01:04
First Quarter – May 20, 23:43
Full Moon – May 27, 23:07


MAY: Corn-planting Moon (Taos)


Cornplanter


The moon in Maytime teases dew
for the dawn's ablutions;
Seduces the sap, entices the juices,
lifts us to action.
In the fallacy of sacrilegious beautification,
Here is no time for the planting of Corn.

In a mud hut somewhere, a Hopi girl
sits grinding last year's harvest,
awaiting the onslaught of blood and ties,
Permitted only to beat the irritant dust-mites
away with her grinding stick,
Enduring the weaving and winding of a
relative matriarch, who plaits her hair into maturity's design.

Symbol of obedience to society,
to servitude and subjugation:
to masculine superiority;
she neither weeps nor complains
though her hands are raw and blistered,
her tender skin itches, and her puerile womb
acknowledges the moment of the moon:
la moment de la lune spills out sans puer.

The initiation complete, she
emerges from her childhood tent knowing her place,
with the shroud of adulthood woven round her face.
This might seem like lore or legend,
stuff of ancient so-called civilizations,
but it goes on still today.

In another hut, an apology for straw bedding,
Young females are incarcerated and lashed
with strobe effects until ready to produce their eggs.
And sometimes they are fed with grain and corn
to assuage some guilt - or rather, demonstrate cowardice:
no wonder the chicken has come to represent
fear; cowardly-custard, corn-fed, yellow-faced fear.
Other animals too are tamed and trained to produce.
In yet another tent, billed as the biggest and best:
Cornplanter, performing horse, praying for Pegasus' wings;
Gargantuan, though hardly a King like his cousin, Kong;
Dumbo (who had the sense to fly - at least to cartoon-land)
Goliath, beached sea elephant, hadn't the giant's strength
or native habitat to escape; rather, a captive in chains.
And Jumbo, conversely, travelled the sea to join Barnum's
Monstrous show, appeased by a barrel of beer on the way
(a costly exercise, but the audience loves a freak).
Who started this abuse of rights, it's hard to tell.
Who permitted this deep sleep to fall upon them!
It's a wonder these simple yet mightily powerful creatures
didn't wipe the smirks off the audiences face:
God knows they had the strength to, if not struck dumb
by their subordinated instinct or sedated apoplexy.
Thus God ordained and gave to man supremacy over all,
who named and subsequently maimed an entire Kingdom.
We all have our rites of passage; all people have their
Naming and initiation ceremonies -
Some afford the animals a special place in theirs.
The sacred cow, the filthy pig, the deified Ganesha:
Do not all these dwell within the temples of the mind?
Then we must award, reward, and re-award all animals
Their regal right among our chosen race.

Moon of Grass Appearing

This month we have seen, in Scotland at least, every weather system – from snow to sideways sleet, howling gales to April showers, hazy summer shimmer and sunsets tinged with dark, Icelandic Ash. Convinced that it is spring, I took my trusty piece of sackcloth up our own extinct volcano, and celebrated something simple: freedom.

Funny, how they say the grass is always greener on the other side. When I got there I found it was not so much, greener nor less green, but simply so: green.

The poem for April mixes the Lakota Sioux name for the full moon with an Iroquois Creation story. The three sisters of the Iroquois, Corn, Beans and Squash are the three spirits that sustain life. Other myths speak of six sisters; either way, the doll created from corn husks was, initially, a symbol of celebrating the gift of sustenance.


Moon Phases, April 2010

Last Quarter – April 6, 09:37
New Moon – April 14, 12:29
First Quarter – April 21, 18:20
Full Moon – April 28, 12:18

APRIL: Moon of Grass Appearing

Corn Sisters


Over hill and dale, in park and pale,
Fairies dibble-dabble in the dam, with
Elfin mischief and lively Spirit-dances,
fording fen and brook and beck and burn;
High upon peak and pike, and under vale,
Trolls in crag and crevice hide beneath bridges
with Goblin menace and Impish glances.

These flights of fancy heralding fortune are
Mini-magicians, ushering joy and delight
to uncles, aunties, siblings, nephews, nieces;
placing mysterious gems in cowslips' ears,
replacing lost teeth with ten pence pieces,
displacing the soot with three gold purses -
nocturnal assistants, too reticent to appear
diurnal; sweet as dewfall, innocent as grass.

Other folk interpolated colours:
summoning seed from six beautiful sisters:
The apoplectic rage of shame-faced red;
panic yellow-faced fear and melancholy blue,
which faces up to pity, nostalgia and regret;
Black, the flipside, face untouched by sun, yet
flowering from the sisters' enigmatic psyche;

Finally, the dappled sun illuminates the flowers
in speckled beauty, paints the pearl-white drops,
defaces the envy of grass as it appeared
naïvely green beneath the April sky at night.

March: Desert Night Lizard

How can a writer be trusted?

How can we know that what is written, and what is read are the same thing?

We cannot. We are the ineffectual jury, who interpret the word as beautiful or moving, but comprehend it not. The truth eludes us, like a lizard in the desert, or like the moon this month, curtained by clouds of sleet and snow.

How can a novel, a poem, a play imitate life when in truth it does not exist? What fidelity to the human experience can we glean from the page once the ephemeral is snapped shut between the covers? This, or that, is all we have: the book is bound and on this hard, hard back we place our hand and swear. On something not even there.

And Bill? You choose. He too is wherever, whatever, whomever your imagination allows you to roam, to do, to be (or not – if that is the question.)


Moon Phases, March 2010

Last Quarter – March 7, 15:42
New Moon – March 15, 21:01
First Quarter – March 23, 11:00
Full Moon – March 30, 02:25


MARCH: Lizard Moon (San Juan)

Desert Night Lizard: Xantusia Vigilis


To the San Juan, he may be a god.
Poised on a bare rock

in the relative nocturnal chill sits Bill:
uncle, cousin, man-in-the-street to us;

Peopled by an oh-so-ordinary name,
Placed tail-up in a jar, ineffectual juror.

How did he come to be there? Nobody knows:

a slither of lit-silver traces his skittering trail
in the once-gold, arid Nevada sand.

With a flick of his tongue and a trick of the tail
He's gone. Yet somewhere still

His smooth-skinned, wide-eyed stare
keeps vigil. Brer Bill. Herr Bill.


Where

FEBRUARY: Moon when Coyotes are Frightened

Different tribes of Native Americans had various names for full moons. In my ‘Year of Indian Moons,’ I have stuck to one particular source, using the names as a rough guide, mixing up a variety of legends and myths. The Coyote is a key figure in these stories, and I could not possibly write this poem without referring to Joni Mitchell, for whom indigenous folklore is a source of great inspiration. I urge you to listen to her album Hejira ­– a masterpiece that has inspired me in so many ways.

There are a couple of problems with the second poem of this cycle. I suggested above (or below, in blog geog.) that January began with a Blue Moon, but to be accurate, this fell on New Year’s Eve. According to certain schools of thought, a Blue Moon occurs when the moon turns full a second time in the same month. Since sidereal and synodic months are not aligned, the lunar and solar years do not run concurrently. A Blue Moon only happens once every two and a half years – hence the expression, possibly from Shakespeare, meaning rare or absurd.

Unfortunately, given that the moon’s cycle takes 29 days, 12 hours 44 minutes and 2.8 seconds, it would be impossible for a full moon to fall twice and therefore turn blue in February – even in a leap year. In some years – 1961, for example, when the moon was blue both in April and January – February missed out on a full moon altogether. The sly dog must’ve been tickled pink that year: no regrets, nor leap of faith; no fears nor hopes; no foes nor friends; no ends, but one (un-)equal eternity.

However, the Farmers’ Almanac of Maine (look it up – you’re on the web), besides listing a load of alternative full-moon nomenclature, suggests that, when occurring in those years when there is a thirteenth full moon, a Blue Moon is the third full moon of four in a fixed season usually containing three. By their rule, this will always fall on the 20th - 23rd of May, February, August or November. So, it could be argued that indeed Coyote saw a Blue Moon in February 2000, which is when this cycle was written, even though he claimed that the moon was full on the 1st of Feb (as it was) and again on the 29th. Does this make any more sense?

Of course not: he can’t be trusted either way.

I’d watch him, if I were you.


Moon Phases, February 2010

Last Quarter – February 5, 23:48

New Moon – February 14, 02:51

First Quarter – February 22, 00:42

Full Moon – February 28, 16:38

Moon when Coyotes are Frightened (Tewa)

No regrets, Coyote


The first of Feb, by leap of faith, finds the moon full,
and the sly dog duly frightened...

Bear wants back his frozen-off tail; Heron, the
ante-prometheus, wants back his stolen fire
– and the great god himself, whose heat and light
Coyote captured, and arrayed the wind's twelve
quarters, irrespective of the tides;

Also the greedy Wishpoosh, whose corpse provided
slices for each and every tribe (or did they
sprout from the charred feathered fancy-dress
which caught out that partying Heron?);

Ram, horns hammered fast into a tree, prepares for revenge,
(he's lucky, says Cow, milked dry by the equally wily Brer Rabbit);
Hen, retrieved from Granny Fox, is now in cohorts with
Porcupine – eternally plagued with dust –
And limping Meadow Lark angrily wields her walking stick,
unimpressed by Coyote's inefficacious tricks.

Every Bird sides with the four little ducks, the earliest dwellers,
whose bravery supplied the audacious tempter
– the callous, impudent trickster – with
Dirt: dry land dredged from their Watery Paradise Garden.

(This, the Crow's story: but who can be trusted in myth?)

He's been around since creation began, shaping the
world out of animal altruism, deceit, or practical joke.
Nine times out of ten his game backfired:
Hawk would chase him through the Whisker Wheat,
While Road Runner traps and taunts Old Wile E.,
beating his retreat, hooting among the tumbleweed.

It's true, he'll never learn: he's far too far
from Appaloosas and Eagles and Tides;
When his own Mother bit his inquisitive nose,
sent him away on his quest to fend for himself,
She thus diminished his ego strength to egotistic pride:
The sin by which the angels fell was not Coyote's downfall.

He's a slippery serpent, born to writhe in the dust of regret,
the eighth and deadliest amendment, ever mourning
his velvet coat, and the loss of his son to eternal death:
(Wolf – doubtless metamorphosed to a greater deification –
saw Coyote laugh on the dark side of his face)

He only opposed the after-life for a laugh:
to him, the acceptable paradox of the human race,
to bask in the light of certainty, or sweat in the dark
while awaiting life's sentence, was a bit of a farce.

This month, however, the planets exercise their own celestial mirth.
As the days of fear wear off, Coyote persuades the Old
Father for just a little extra time
(the humans, bound to their pendular systems, concede):

The moon, true to form, re-emerges fully, blue.
Returns the Old Man's coat to its former hue.

Begged, Burrowed or Lent

Now here’s a tale, tricky but true, from some time after 1992. I was doing a choir-tour of the chapels and churches of Southern England, a busman’s summer holiday. We were staying in none-too illustrious hostels and boarding-houses of opulent public schools; performing to relatively appreciative geriatric audiences, and imbibing the local beer (apart from the busman).


During our stay In Bryanston School, we inhabited the Girls’ Dormitory - relishing the rare opportunity to impersonate the 13th Duke of Wybourne (with my reputation? - scandalous!) Searching for spoils, a friend and I found a handful of black and white photos tucked away; the outcome of a 6th form photography project, left behind. One could assume the pupils had left too.




My friend and I thought they were great pictures, too good to be abandoned. So we took them away with us. The only clue to their ownership or perhaps the subject was the names scribbled on the back. My reaction to this mystery was to write a piece of music, Six Variations for Voice and Clarinet, dedicated ‘to Polly and Alex, wherever they may be’. Their image, transfigured, like the transient ghosts of the imagination, was all I had. Yet Alex and Polly exist, surely?

Where, Bill?

Last Sunday was the Feast of the Transfiguration, when all that is ghostly comes to seem real – or vice versa. To me, it was an Ordinary Sunday (in the Sondheim sense) – except that I trashed the ghastly 1980s fitted cupboards in my spare bedroom. It had been a long time coming (I blame Thatcher), precipitated by the precipitation from the flat above that had sent my ceiling crumbling.

And should the turret crumble: no great loss.

Yesterday was Ash Wednesday; the day to bury all one’s previous misgivings in a heap of self-flagellation. I could spend the rest of my life heaping ashen guilt upon my self, or I could just leave it to the tabloids to dress me with the sackcloth of eternity. Fuck them: I made my plea. Yes, I stole those pictures, but I did not take them. If anyone can identify the image - shooter or shot -let me know, if you can or dare. I will repay my debt – to whomever it is due.


For now, consider it lent.