St Enogat is a small, pretty town just a few miles from Dinard on Brittany’s Côte d’Émeraude. One quiet Sunday I sat in the shade of a persimmon tree and watched two elderly men preparing to play pétanque on an otherwise deserted terrain. They went about their business silently at first, moving slowly and deliberately in the manner of those for whom the activity is governed by unwritten but immutable protocols. Half way through the game, without varying pace or style, the blue-shirted man began to speak. This is what I may have overheard.
PETANQUE AT ST. ENOGART
There are the two men, this square of ground, the sun, the cypress tree. The men unpack their boules. The man in the blue shirt clacks a pair together. The man in the red shirt arcs the coche into the dust, steps back and lights a cigarette. The blue shirt throws his three. One hugs the coche and two lie close. The red shirt bowls. His final boule scatters the group. The two advance. They contemplate the spread of boules and coche, the disposition of them all, then stoop to gather and cast the coche, the boules again. Inside the cypress shade the blue shirt cups his boule and lifts it high. At the point of release his fingers tip it back, reverse its spin. At the point of its contact with the coche he says: “Your sister. Is she well?” The red shirt draws deep on his cigarette. “Quite well”, he says. “She’s been home three weeks now. She’s walking. She can cook. She walks the dogs down by the canal. She manages”. The blue shirt listens, two boules held between his fingers. The red shirt drops his cigarette, grinds it into the dust. “Go on”, he says, nodding to the splay of boules and coche. And from out of the shade of the cypress, the blue shirt drops each boule behind the coche, completing a triangular wall. “Once”, he says, still stooping, his hands on his knees. “There was a time once”. The red shirt lights a second cigarette, shakes out the match, steps up to throw. “There’s always a time once”, he says and he looses a boule. The blue shirt watches the arc and fall, the puff of dust where it lands behind the triangle. “Celine and I”, he says. “On the beach at St Enogart. Down by the rocks”. The red shirt straightens, purses his lips. “Enough”, he says. “Enough”. “And then”, the blue shirt says, “you and I, we might have been brothers”. The red shirt works the cigarette to the corner of his mouth. “Brothers enough without”, he says.
I have a sleep disorder that – compounded currently by the side effects of medication – ensures that each and every night is fragmented into a sort of archipelago of the 5 stages of slumber varying from just stages 1 and 2 up to the full cycle, including REM. In between these sequences is inserted from time to time long periods of insomnia. Living as we do in relative rural isolation, this means that the sometimes comforting social sounds of nocturnal traffic, arrivals and departures and even the late-night carolling of a friendly drunk are denied us. Randy cats, foraging foxes and the haunted crooning of the barn owl only serve to underpin the sense of utter isolation and exposure that can be the principle characteristics of insomnia. This poem describes a joyful exception to that dilemma.
THEIR VOICES IN THE NIGHT
Unable to sleep, I sit before the heartless brilliance of the screen with the real-world darkness
hovering, fearful but persistent, at my back. It seems as if time has packed her bags and left
for the coast and then beyond. I take off my glasses, knuckle away the mess of my tears. And then,
like importunate drunks through a suddenly opened door, the geese are overhead. Some crass dispute
as to the whereabouts of water in the impossible night, their voices skronking inside a collision of
cranking necks and wings. As they tumble through the unseen clouds, I laugh out loud and love them all
for their unconsidered vandalism, neither thought nor theory troubling the palate of their need.
If I have ever adhered to any kind of faith it’s been to a belief based on hope against rational expectation that the capacity for redemption and salvation is a product of obdurate human desire and will alone. Once upon a time, that faith fuelled a conviction that the only political system within which we might grow towards our hitherto almost entirely unrealised potential was anarchism. Now the black flag is a poor, tattered thing and I oscillate between anger and sadness and sudden bursts of unwarranted optimism brought on when some event, local or beyond, seems to confirm the human spirit as more generous, self-sacrificial and loving than it is venal, selfish and full of hate.
There are very few certainties in my scheme of things. (In fact, to my general perception there is very little scheme of things at all!) But one judgement that time has substantiated for me again and again is the old truism that wherever power is concentrated beyond the moderation of those over whom it is wielded there will be corruption and abuse. But because I live in the ‘real world’ of legitimised greed, of souls mortgaged to consumerism, of institutionalised injustice, I no longer believe in some great political epiphany that, when the scales fall simultaneuously from our eyes, will have us shrugging off our chains in favour of the anarchist dream. But somehow, in the face of the cynical pragmatism and exhausted defeatism that has taken the place of informed ideology, I still on occasion turn around in absurd hope when I hear the old anarchist rallying cry: ‘Be realistic and demand the impossible!’
For a few years in the early ‘70s, during that final flaring of some kind of socialist sunrise, I gathered together in a little green notebook a collection of appropriate quotations. Most were drawn from the anarchist source books that were my serial purchases (from Camden Town’s Compendium Bookshop) at the time, but others popped up from here and there and got scribbled down lest, in those all-analogue days, they should be forgotten and their points of provenance lost. What struck me at the time of compiling them was how little both the nature of repression and aspiration have changed throughout history and, of course, that’s my reflection now. Cultural context isn’t the determinant of dissent and rebellion; it’s the human spirit under unendurable pressure that has the commoner twisting, turning and rising up.
:::
To be governed is to be watched over, inspected, spied on, directed, legislated, regimented, closed in, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, assessed, evaluated, censored, commanded; all by creatures that have neither the right, nor wisdom, nor virtue… Government means to be subjected to tribute, trained, ransomed, exploited, monopolised, extorted, pressured, mystified, robbed; all in the name of public utility and the general good. Then, at the first sign of resistance or word of complaint, one is repressed, tined, despised, vexed, pursued, hustled, beaten up, garrotted, imprisoned, shot…sold, betrayed, and, to cap it all, ridiculed, mocked, outraged and dishonoured. That is government, that is its justice and its morality. PIERRE-JOSEPH PROUDHON
My good people, things cannot go well in England, nor ever shall, till everything be made common, and there are neither villains nor gentlemen, but we shall all be united together, and the lords shall be no greater masters than ourselves. JOHN BALL (renegade priest & ideologist of the Peasants’ Revolt, 1381)
Commons to close and keep, Poor folk for bread to cry and weep, Towns pulled down to pasture sheep; This is the new guise.
Envy waxeth wondrous strong, The Rich doeth the poor wrong, God of his mercy suffereth long The devil his work to do.
The towns go down, the land decays, Of corn fields, plain lays, Great men maketh nowadays A sheepcote in the church. ANONYMOUS POEM, early 16th century
LEAR: Poor naked wretches, whereso’er you are That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm, How shall yourn houseless heads, and unfed sides, Your loop’d and window’d raggedness defend you From such seasons as these? O I have ta’en Too little care of this: take physic, Pomp, Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel, That thou mayst shake the superflux to them, And show the Heavens more just. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves. WILLIAM PITT
Listen, O Daughters, to my voice. Listen to the Words of Wisdom. So shall you govern over all; let Moral Duty tune your tongue. But be your hearts harder than the nether millstone… Compel the poor to live upon a Crust of bread, by soft mild arts. Smile when they frown, frown when they smile; and when a man looks pale With Labour and abstinence, say he looks healthy and happy; And when his children sicken, let them die; there are enough Born, even too many, and our Earth will be overrun Without these arts. If you would make the poor live with temper, With pomp give every crust of bread you give; with gracious cunning Magnify small gifts; reduce the man to want a gift, and then give with pomp. Say he smiles if you hear him sigh. If pale, say he is ruddy. Preach temperance: say he is overgorg’d and drowns his wit In strong drink, tho’ you know that bread and water are all He can afford. Flatter his wife, pity his children, till we can Reduce all to our will, as spaniels are taught with art. WILLIAM BLAKE, from Vala, or the Four Zoas.
Yes! To this thought I hold with firm persistence; the last result of wisdom stamps it true: he only earns his freedom and existence who daily conquers them anew. JOHANN WOLGANG VON GOETHE
All things are sold: the very light of heaven Is venal; earth’s unsparing gifts of love, The smallest and most despicable things That lurk in the abysses of the deep, All objects of our life, even the life itself, And the poor pittance which the law allows Of liberty, the fellowship of man, Those duties which his heart of human love Should urge him to perform instinctively, Are bought and sold as in a public mart Of undisguising selfishness, that sets On each its price, the stamp-mark of her reign. Even love is sold… PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigues of supporting it. THOMAS PAINE
THE TOLPUDDLE MARTYRS
God is our guide! from field, from wave, From plough, from anvil, and from loom; We come, our country’s rights to save, And speak a tyrant faction’s doom: We raise the watch-word liberty; We will, we will, we will be free!
God is our guide! no swords we draw, We kindle not war’s battle fires; By reason, union, justice, law, We claim the birth-right of our sires: We raise the watch-word liberty; We will, we will, we will be free!!! GEORGE LOVELESS, one of the group of Dorchester labourers – known subsequently as the Tolpuddle Martyrs, after their village of origin – who were sentenced to seven years transportation for joining a union.
Freedom has a thousand charms to show That slaves, howe’er contented, cannot know. WILLIAM COWPER
Overgrown military establishments are under any form of government inauspicious to liberty, and are to be regarded as particularly hostile to Republican liberty. GEORGE WASHINGTON
MOURN NOT THE DEAD
Mourn not the dead that in the cool earth lie – Dust unto dust – The calm, sweet earth that mothers all who die As all men must;
Mourn not your captive comrades who must dwell – Too strong to strive – Within each steel-bond coffin of a cell, Buried alive;
But rather mourn the apathetic throng – The cowed and the meek – Who see the world’s great anguish and its wrong And dare not speak! RALPH CHAPLIN, Industrial Workers of the World activist
The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves. WILLIAM HAZLITT, English essayist
THE IDEA
Is that we are not perfect Nor perfectable.
Is that the desire to lead Will destroy ourselves and others.
Is that when we act alone It is harder to harm.
Is that when we act collectively We must not surrender our selves.
Is that land cannot be owned Nor animals nor people.
Is that money is meaningless When there is no property.
Is that we disavow marriage. It is the union of Church and State.
Is that no human is sovereign The one over the other.
Is that our children are The common wealth.
Is that there is no god Nor heaven nor hell.
Is that only we can be the creators Of paradise on earth. ANONYMOUS. (19th century Spanish anarchists called their beliefs The Idea).
THE INTERNATIONALE (first two verses)
Arise, ye prisoners of starvation! Arise ye wretched of the earth, For justice thunders condemnation, A better world’s in birth. No more tradition’s chains shall bind us, Arise, ye slaves! no more in thrall! The earth shall rise on new foundations, We have been naught, we shall be all.
CHORUS:
‘’Tis the final conflict Let each stand in his place, The Internationale Unites the human race.
We want no condescending saviours, To rule us from a judgement hall; We workers ask not for their favours; Let us consult for all. To make the thief disgorge his booty To free the spirit from its cell, We must ourselves decide our duty, We must decide and do it well. EUGENE POTTIER, translated by CHARLES H. KERR
For a poet – for any kind of writer – English is a seductive language. With a vocabulary that is rich in synonyms way beyond reasonable need, wrapped up in a mind-boggling and jaw-busting complexity of conjugational structure, it seems almost mean-spirited to resist its blandishments. Small wonder that Dylan Thomas’s capacity for intoxication above and beyond the call of duty afflicted his creative output every bit as much as his social life. Interesting too, at the other end of the linguistic spectrum, that Samuel Beckett exerted so much energy in paring the English language back to the bone in a search for a barer, leaner form. And small wonder, maybe, that, in the final analysis, his language of preference for writing was French.
Since schooldays I have been intrigued by the stark simplicity of the poetry of Jacques Prévert and attempting to translate pieces into English remains a fascinating exercise. My enormously enlightened French teacher Roger Gerhardt regularly set us translation assignments using the poems and lyrics of the likes of Prévert, Paul Fort, Anne Sylvestre and Georges Brassens. And many years on I posted several Prévert translations, along with other treatments of contemporary French poems, to my first blog, Dick Jones’ Patteran Pages. What strikes me each time I translate is the need to resist the temptation to substitute for some dry, laconic statement the kind of imagistic phrasing that a poet writing in English might feel impelled to use. All too often the direct, the pithy, the economic are anathema to the writer steeped in the cultural traditions of allusion, euphemism, equivocation and circumlocution.
If I have begun to respond to the need for absolute fidelity to the skeletal properties of Prévert’s verse, realisation has come from an unusual source – the blues. Much of his poetry has been set to music, particularly in the boulevardier genre. And there has long been a link between aspects of French chanson and the blues – albeit one more of spirit and atmosphere than of direct style. There is something in the specificity of focus, the repetition of a repeated theme and the interposition of surreal or dreamlike imagery that creates an association between a poem like Déjeuner du Matin and a ruefully reflective blues like T-Bone Walker’s Mean Old World.
Beyond this point all is mere speculation. If there’s a PhD to be had in the pairing of the French verse of terse personal narrative and the blues, generously I’ll leave the option open to another to chase it up. In the meantime, here’s my rendition of Jacques Prévert’s Déjeuner du Matin, followed by a set of shorter poems, and culminating in the chilling Despair Sits On A Bench.
MORNING MEAL
He poured the coffee Into the cup He poured the milk Into the cup of coffee He put sugar In the café au lait With the teaspoon He stirred it He drank the café au lait And he replaced the cup Without speaking to me He lit a cigarette He blew smoke rings He placed the ash In the ashtray Without speaking to me Without looking at me He got up He placed his hat On his head He put on His mackintosh Because it was raining And he went Into the rain Without a word Without looking at me And me I placed My head in my hands And I cried.
…
ALICANTE
An orange on the table Your dress upon the carpet And you in my bed Sweet present of the present Freshness of the night Warmth of my life.
…
THE STREAM
Much water has passed beneath the bridge and much blood too But upon feet of love there flows a great white stream And in the gardens of the moon where every day is my festival this stream sings in its sleep and this moon is my head within which there turns a great blue sun and the sun is your eyes.
…
THE FIRST DAY
White sheets in a cupboard Red sheets on a bed A child within the mother The mother in her pain The father in the corridor The corridor in the house The house in the town The town within the night The death within the cry.
…
PARIS BY NIGHT
Three matches, struck one by one in the night.
The first to see your face entire.
The second to see your eyes.
The last to see your mouth,
and then the darkness all around to remember
as I hold you in my arms.
…
SHIFTING SANDS
Demons and marvels Winds and tides In the distance the sea has already vanished Demons and marvels Winds and tides And you Like seagrass touched gently by the wind In your bed of sand you shift in dreams Demons and marvels Winds and tides In the distance the sea has already vanished But in your half-closed eyes Two little waves remain Demons and marvels Winds and tides Two little waves in which to drown.
Note: This poem was set to music by film composer Joseph Kosma (‘Les Regles Du Jeu’, ‘Les Grands Illusions’, ‘Les Enfants Du Paradis’), for the film ‘Les Visiteurs Du Soir’. Kosma also knew Brecht, worked with his musical collaborator Hans Eisler and supplied music to Prevert’s ‘Les Feuilles Mortes’.
DESPAIR SITS ON A BENCH
In a square on a bench sits a man who calls out as you pass He wears pince-nez an old grey suit He smokes a little cheroot he is seated and he calls out as you pass Or he simply beckons Best not to look Best not to listen Best to pass by Make as if you haven’t seen him As if you haven’t heard him Best to pass by pick up your feet If you glance at him If you listen He beckons and nothing and no one Can stop you from seating yourself beside him Then he looks at you and smiles And your terrible suffering begins And the man continues to smile And you smile the same smile Exactly And the more you smile the more you suffer Terribly The more you suffer the more you smile Fixedly And you stay there Frozen still Smiling on the bench Children play right next to you Passers-by pass by Unhurried Birds fly up Leaving one tree For another And you stay there On the bench And you know you know That you will never play Like the children You know that you will never pass by Unhurried Like the passers-by That you will never fly up Leaving one tree for another Like the birds.
The enduring presence of old-school ska and the various revivalist outbreaks that occurred on both sides of the Atlantic alongside the ever-developing forms and sub-sets of its descendant genre reggae is a mighty tribute to the passion and ingenuity of its pioneers back in the early ’60s. Whilst attempting to capture something of the dancehall drive of the jump-bands of the ‘40s and the thick gumbo sound of ‘50s Louisiana R&B, those Jamaican musicians managed to synthesize an extraordinarily compelling combination of lyrical wit, melodic inventiveness and irresistible rhythmic pulse.
My first encounter with Jamaica’s urban folk music predates its incendiary Two-Tone revival in the UK by a good 25 years. For me the music will be forever associated with that succession of first and second generation West Indians who settled in the terraced and tower-blocked suburban sprawl of South-East London. In the mid-‘60s I was a student at Goldsmiths’ College, the teacher training wing of London University. The main building was situated on the busy trunk road that had the Elephant and Castle as the gateway to the inner city at one end and the long-absorbed villages of Lewisham, Greenwich, Deptford, Blackheath, Catford and the shrivelling edges of rural Kent at the other.
Behind and beyond the college countless bisecting roads named after forgotten Victorian burgermeisters and Boer War battlegrounds linked the territories, each one lined either with flat-faced terraced housing, narrow front doors opening onto the street, or, more respectably, semi-detached late 19th century two- and three-storey villas, now converted into self-contained apartments. A seedy pall of neglect hung over the region, as if decades of smoke and coal dust from the steam railways lingered still. There was no consistent sense of entrenched ownership, no evidence of a stable core of residents whose long inhabitation declared belonging, a vibrant and centred community. Absentee landlords rented out the flats and a ragged tide of stony-faced sub-letting landladies, embattled families, elderly couples who wanted no trouble and students a long way from home ebbed and flowed through the shabbily furnished rooms. Corner shops, unchanged in appearance (and in some cases apparently in stock) since the early years of the century, supplied baked beans, sliced white bread and rolling tobacco to the neighbourhoods. Grim, chemically-lit self-service laundrettes churned the garments and bedclothes of the populace day and night. In steamy cafes bus drivers, off-duty postmen and truanting schoolkids ordered bacon butties and sucked on Pepsi-Colas and pints of orange tea. Dark, sticky-floored pubs served up warm pints to solitary old men by day and rollicking undergraduates by night.
It was the second year of the Drama course. After 10 years of boarding school I was ready for my own place and, with my pal Dick Hughes, I paid the deposit on a flat in a squalid little terraced house along the steep gradient that linked New Cross Gate with Deptford. Dick and I had the top floor – two minute bedrooms and a tiny kitchen with a veteran and stoneware sink and one cold water tap. There was no bathroom and, bafflingly, no toilet. In our anxiety to embrace the bohemian lifestyle we’d missed the bit where Mr. Buddhu, our landlord, had explained that we would need to arrange access to the single backyard toilet with the multi-generational Indian family downstairs. Since they rarely answered the door on which we pounded after a night’s steady drinking at the New Cross House, this access was rarely available. We managed a couple of weeks of bladder and bowel control and baths in the ancient municipal facility behind the college. But having managed to ignore the scurrying sounds at night, we finally drew the line at sharing cheese sandwiches with rats so bold that, when discovered at breakfast one morning, they remained at the kitchen table until they had finished.
A larger flat was found in Tyrwhitt Road. It occupied the middle of three floors and although the toilet and bathroom were shared, they were on our floor, as was the gas meter. (This cooperative piece of equipment wasn’t fussy about coinage and would accept readily one of those old French francs with the hole in the middle. We dangled the coin on a piece of tough fishing twine into the slot and sharply withdrew it the moment we heard the gas ignite). Again, we each had our own room, but this time the galley was marginally larger and it had a hot water tap. What puzzled us was why the rent was the same as what we had paid for the Clifton Rise rat trap. This was clarified for us by the cheery Irish proprietor of the corner shop. It was because all the other tenants, and the neighbours on both sides too, were from the Carribean and the landlord, a Greek Cypriot called Christodoulu, was generous to his white tenants in their adversity. In order to take up the financial slack, he simply charged his West Indian clients higher rents.
The family upstairs of us was quietly respectable. Every Sunday they would emerge wearing black suits and straw hats with lace veils, and white gloves and they’d head off for the Jubilee Baptist Church in Peckham. The family downstairs were in glorious, shamless contrast. They were a young couple called Byron and Lucinda Godrich with two tiny children, a girl, Millie, & a boy, Manley. Byron had a portable stall selling records and sheet music and he worked three times a week, moving between Deptford, Greenwich and Lewisham markets. The remainder of the time he alternated between sinking deep into a broken-down sofa wreathed in smoke and dancing rubber-limbed on the threadbare carpet before the empty fireplace. Lucinda brewed black tea and stirred a permanently simmering pot of bully beef and rice with one child on her hip and the other clinging to her skirts.
Dick and I were made aware of their presence on the first night of our residence. Exhausted by the move (we’d transported all our possessions to and fro the mile-and-a-half lashed onto a single bicycle), we’d had a couple of beers and retired early. I was jerked out of a deep and dreamless sleep in the small hours by the sound of music. It wasn’t the usual dull, bass-heavy thump of unidentifiable music heard through walls; it was a masonry-shaking, pile driving immanence of sound driven by a lurching, rollocking rhythm with the emphasis on the offbeat. I sat up in bed transfixed. The immediate sensation was of being locked in the engine room of an ocean liner, a foot or two away from the driving pistons. But the secondary sensation on rising into wakelfulness was one of delight: what was this extraordinary noise that sounded so familiar and yet so exotic at the same time? It continued for about an hour, melody and tempo varying, but that loping beat a constant. And then suddenly it ceased, leaving in its wake the echo of rattling drums, bubbling bass, a guitar played on the upstroke, creaky, slightly off-key sax and brass and, riding on top, impassioned but largely incomprehensible lyrics.
The following day Byron, emerging from his flat to buy a paper, found me sitting on the stairs, my arms clasped around my knees, rocking back and forth like a child in pain, the skipping and churning having minutes before fired up again. Mistaking my hunched state for acute discomfort, he apologised profusely and turning back towards his door, he promised immediate silence. When hastily I put him right, he grinned, pushed a hand through his unruly hair and invited me in. I was introduced to the family, a cup of tea was brewed and we spent the rest of the morning (on a day dedicated to last-minute exam coaching at the college) going through stacked boxes of Trojan, Island and Blue Beat singles.
Over the next few months, driven by Byron Godriche’s messianic zeal, I received a crash course in state-of-the-art ska. Via the music from the likes of Jamaica Fats, Derrick Morgan, Cornell Campbell and Ezz Reco, I was able to make the clear connection between early ska and the tight-yet-loose swing beat of Louisiana R&B, the first point of distinct influence. Higgs and Wilson and Clancy Eccles introduced me to the greater emphasis on the vocal line. Early Jimmy Cliff brought in the contemporary influence of American chart pop styling, But most intoxicating of all was the surging pulse of the ska that was being recorded there and then, both in Kingston, Jamaica and in tiny studios all around South London, and an abiding love for The Skatalites, Toots and The Maytals, Prince Buster, Drumbago and The Blenders, Desmond Dekker and countless one-hit wonders was born. Although the incomprehensibility of most of the lyrics added to the mystery and dynamism of the music for me, Byron Insisted on translating everything and soon I was laughing with him (albeitt, as a rather unworldly middle class white boy, secretly shocked) at the open sexuality of his favourites – such tracks as Penny Reel and Papa, Do It Sweet, full of uninhibited bawdy joy. And I was deeply impressed and not a little intrigued by the strange melange of political satire and residual African iconography of other songs. It seemed that every area of human experience was covered by ska and all of it carried along on a storming, skanking beat.
Later, after I moved from Tyrwhitt Road to a flat in Lee Green, I used to delight in evening and night-time wandering up and down the roads leading off Lewisham High Street, moving through the merging pools of sound that spilled from one open window after another. Even more exciting was the brief time that my then girlfriend spent in a Goldsmiths’ hall of residence in Brixton (this locality having the highest density of West Indian population in London). I would drag her through the market, pausing at one record stall after another to part with the remnants of my student grant. In fact, a principal cause of our parting was, as I recollect, her always having to buy the drinks and cinema tickets!
By the time I started teaching, first at a primary school in New Cross and subsequently at a large and terrifying boys’ secondary school just off Albany Road, Deptford, ska had emerged from the ghetto. Records had charted and the first wave of skinheads had adopted the more obscure sounds as their signature music. Ska mutated into something altogether more accommodating to the host nation and my interest in its development waned as jangling folk-rock and feedback-happy psychedelia captured the hearts and souls of white middle class youth. The world changed very rapidly and my brief direct relationship with an emergent musical form that carried within it the evolving cultural identity and deep informing roots of an entire people was eclipsed by my own race’s preoccupation with a largely spurious and self-indulgent inner world. I had shared enormous shaggy spliffs with Byron and listened to early Bob Marley through a haze of half-sleep and laughter. But now serial smoking of ‘red leb’ & ‘pakki black’ (the casual racism entirely lost on us at the time) became the sacrament at the heart of the self-proclaimed ‘alternative culture’ and the instrumental functions of the drug as a filter through which to experience the music were transformed into something, in part at least, self-serving and fashionable.
It wasn’t until the sudden explosion of the post-punk Two Tone craze that I re-discovered ska. Music was still a vital force at the centre of my life – I was playing in a hard-working blues band and spending much too little time doing my bit at home. But I’d lost a sense of popular music as a defining element at the heart of a nascent culture. The parade of bands that swiftly followed in the wake of The Specials and Madness brought something of that back for me and, once again, I found myself shuffling to and fro, a white shade of my rubber-limbed black mentor, to the old classics and the new sounds that drew both reverently but innovatively from them.
It’s nearly 40 years since the founding of the Two-Tone label and, as I type, the sounds of The Maytals’ Funky Kingston give way to The Beat’s Stand Down, Margaret. Even in very advanced middle age, I can still ‘Do the Reggay’ as well as any other white fan of a quintessentially black musical form. However, much as I enjoy some of the more off-the-wall hip-hop, for me, a rather unworldly middle class white boy, the West Indian/British Afro-Caribbean nexus will always be best represented by the elemental loping rhythms of pure, mid-‘60s hard-skanking ska.
It was jazz that finally provided a soundtrack to my nascent sense of rebellion. And it was understanding jazz that finally gave me a sense of the world as a place in which I too might step outside the four-square frame and improvise around a theme.
This story is true. In the sense that improvising around a theme remains true throughout…
MORGAN, MULLIGAN AND ME
‘My Funny Valentine’ Art Farmer – trumpet Gerry Mulligan – baritone sax Bill Crow – bass Dave Bailey – drums
There was it seemed a chance after all
a chance that in spite of the thick cat curve of
Morgan’s midnight hair; the electric green surveillance of
those Cleopatra eyes; the devastating scorn of that
elevated lip, she might just notice me for all my looks
laughable un- photographable. A neutral party told me late
one Tuesday after lunch and with all of break before us
(this for the price of my last French cigarette) that she had
a thing a real thing a kink for a saxophone.
Where all the other girls had things for a kiss-curl fall
or a hand drooped limp at the wrist or a hip-switch
twist away from the microphone she favoured the blue smoke
of a saxophone. So it was tongue and breath against bone and sinew
and I knew that this I could accommodate and more.
So when some other afternoon (the golden hour gone grey with rain)
I saw her curled alone along the studio window seat watching the wind
in the trees along the drive I slipped the disc from
its whisky amber sleeve laid it like an offering to
the turntable lifted on the stylus and sat down across
the room head bowed hands clasped in shadow.
Mulligan and Funny Valentine: the lemon slice of Farmer’s
trumpet lead; the distant bumble of the baritone before it lifts
its fuzzy head and whispers its sweet and cruel put-down
praises up until the two slow circling voices wood and wire
ice and water drop together wound into that comic valentine.
And she uncoiled raising shoulders lifting hips turning last her head
until like a sideways sphinx she watched cat still cat steady.
Then she said Encore and coiled again but now away from light
and facing shade my shade. She smiled. And I smiled too.
Another attempt at disentanglement from Facebook. Tacit collusion with Zuckerberg hypocrisy and the overall cynicism at the heart of the Facebook process is the larger context and a growing disillusionment with my self-created role as the well-patronised curator of a wide range of re-posted material against that of the largely ignored sharer of my own poetry is the personal dimension.
The former is an individual reflection of a currently widening sense of anger and disgust. The latter sense is, of course, entirely subjective, but it’s been accumulating for some time. It seems that I can manage the curation function effortlessly whilst failing almost entirely to generate a similar level of reader interest (if, inevitably, from a narrower constituency) as is stimulated by my poetry peers. At a time when I’m trying very hard to revive my ability to write at all, this indifference is discouraging, even disheartening.
I’ll continue to post material to this blog, even though its tiny reach will have very few people reading any of it. But when I shut down the Patteran Pages and then subsequently, after a break, set up Sisyphus Ascending, I knew that this would be the case. The season of the slow-grow blog is long passed and I lost such momentum that I had left even as I attempted to sustain the Patteran Pages during the rise of the ‘fast-food’ social media. Sisyphus Ascending will operate best as an archive, maintained for my own satisfaction. Not an ideal state of being for one whose original motivation way back in the early noughties was to share communication within a wide and vital community of fellow bloggers. But ‘these are the rigs of the time, me boys, these are the rigs of the time’!
As for the poetry, that will form the core of what appears on these pages. I believe that I’ve managed to re-locate the deep current on which I was able to draw before my nearly two-year period of virtual silence and so that must bring its intrinsic rewards as before and I must satisfy myself with that.
As for Facebook, at this insomniac point at 02.30 on Monday morning I haven’t a clue as to what action or inaction lies ahead. Certainly the overwhelming desire is to shut down completely and return to the old analogue world. But, but…
