An inept ghost who failed his ghosting and is now about to fail his psychopomp exam and has read Thornton Wilder's great play THE SKIN OF OUR TEETH. I used to look after a gent who was very partial to the drink and he used to ramble on like this interspersed with flashes of his reading. Having once or twice almost snuffed it I thought I had the right to give it a go of what happens when one dies.

Yet another street poem from Penelope Shuttle's wonderful STREET WISE workshop at The Poetry School

This was an empty street in Malta so whatever was happening or had happened was...neither here or there.

***

SKIN & BLISTER is Cockney rhyming slang for sister. We were so close we could have worn each other fingerprints and as a little boy I was delighted to do so. I was her and me was she. This I guess is something we did to amuse ourselves before...telly arrived.

A MAD WORLD, MY MASTERS  is a Jacobean stage play written by Thomas Middleton,a comedy first performed around 1605 and first published in 1608. The title is proverbial, and was used by a pamphleteer, Nicholas Breton, in 1603. The title later became the basis for the title of Stanley Kramer's 1963 film, "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World".

The title of the play was proverbial a phrase dismissive of the craziness of life. Another Middleton  play goes by the well known title of ANYTHING FOR A QUIET LIFE!

There would be no stop and sing time or now we are singing time...songs and poems were threaded through needle's eye of reality and stitched into my consciousness. Moore's melodies and such arrived in the act of planing wood or digging potatoes or making a bicycle from scratch from scraps found abandoned. The Da was an inveterate shed maker and anything that could be built in a shed and a great maker of bicycles...a bike for all ten of us! The songs and poems flowed through the ordinary process of the day which I through an emotional osmosis soaked up through my very being...music mapping the invisible landscape of the hidden self.

After Thomas Moore's wife, Elizabeth, was badly scarred by smallpox, she refused to leave her room, believing herself ugly and unlovable. To convince her his love was unwavering, Moore composed the ‘Endearing’ poem which he set to an old Irish melody and sang outside her bedroom door. He later wrote that this restored her confidence and re-kindled their love.

BELIEVE me, if all those endearing young charms,
Which I gaze on so fondly to-day,
Were to change by to-morrow, and fleet in my arms,
Like fairy-gifts, fading away!
Thou wouldst still be ador'd as this moment thou art,
Let thy loveliness fade as it will;
And, around the dear ruin, each wish of my heart
Would entwine itself verdantly still!
II.
It is not while beauty and youth are thine own,
And thy cheeks unprofan'd by a tear,
That the fervour and faith of a soul can be known,
To which time will but make thee more dear!
Oh! the heart, that has truly lov'd, never forgets,
But as truly loves on to the close;
As the sun-flower turns on her god, when he sets,
The same look which she turn'd when he rose!

When the Kintetsu Yoshino Line's special express Type 16600 or Type 26000 "Sakura Liner" trains depart Asuka Station (in Asuka, Takaichi District, Nara Prefecture, Japan) a rendition of the tune is played within the train to announce departure. In Japan, the tune is also known as "Shine with the Flowers of Spring Days".

The Angel is from a 10th Century mural in the Church of St. George in Sofia.

I used to study here for my Leaving Cert and go and read aloud Elizabeth Gaskell's NORTH AND SOUTH and MARY BARTON to the English dead. They listened intently to every word I said. Some had already read them but then others hadn't read it all so were eager to catch up and hear the ending. Sheeps would often and often comment on the texts but always the same auld baaaaa remark. John Huston used a night time snowy dark of this in his film THE DEAD for the beautiful "...snow is falling all over Ireland" end sequence. CIE used to use it with the bus coming down the hill in its early 80's ads. So it's a place I always like to return to when I return to the Land of Ire!

"I do not know how it is possible. . .to live in such fire."

Dante

NESCIO is the Latin for "I don't know."

The Romans actually had a verb "nescire" meaning "not to know"

The title was encountered during our visit to the National Gallery in Sofia and we instantly fell in love with it. It is from Nicola Kezhuharovo( 1892-1971 )and the painting comes from 1922. It depicts a distraught mother prostrate before her daughter who stares mad-eyed and wildly into space whiles being enfolded and enraptured by the asaid fore-mentioned dragon of the title. On closer inspection the dragon turns out to be a handsome hunk of ectoplasm who has the feathered wings of an angel and the coiled serpent body of a lamiae...what John Keats could have done with this! It fairly set the imagination racing!

"Not all people exist in the same Now."

Ernest  Bloch  in  his 1935  Heritage of our Times(Erbschaft dieser Zeit ).


"Not all people exist in the same Now. They do so only externally, by virtue of the fact that they may all be seen today. But that does not mean that they are living at the same time with others. Rather, they carry earlier things with them, things which are intricately involved. One has one's times according to where one stands corporeally. . . times older than the present continue to effect older strata; here it is easy to return or dream one's way back to older times. . .in general, different years resound in the one that has just been recorded and prevails. Moreover, they do not emerge in a hidden way as previously but rather, they contradict the Now in a very peculiar way, awry, from the rear.  . .many earlier forces, from quite a different Below, are beginning to slip between."

***

Tears for Fears MAD WORLD comes on the radio as I fall out of my(self)and death guts my world whilst reading  A MAD WORLD, MY MASTERS.

"Tis a mad world (my masters) and in sadnes / I travail'd madly in these dayes of madnes."

"All around me are familiar faces
Worn out places, worn out faces
Bright and early for their daily races
Going nowhere, going nowhere
Their tears are filling up their glasses
No expression, no expression
Hide my head I want to drown my sorrow
No tomorrow, no tomorrow."

*******

Going back to Ireland is often referred to as going 'back to the auld sod' and so it is that I have the landscape of my childhood question me as I remain silent in the face of fixed places such as houses melt into literally thin air and I walk through what is there but isn't there anymore. I am my own living ghost.

The Irish greeting of 'Is it yourself that's in it? ' always amused me as if the greeter was making sure that your corporeal shape hadn't indeed been taken over by the Devil and that you were now a man possessed! If the answer was 'Sure...aren't ya seeing me with your own two eyes ya ejeet or is it blind ya are or what! ' then that indeed was you. If a deep dark voice that smelt of sulphur boomed 'I am the Lord of the Underworld earthling and you will rot in Hell if you don't buy me a pint! ' then it was more likely the Devil himself or somebody with a wicked sense of of humour. Anyway and anyhow the Devil you know was always better than the Devil ya didn't know. Better to err on the side of caution rather than be having a hell of a time in the place down below.

***

I wanted to speak not just of the words said but more their effect on me and how they sank into my psyche and entered my unconsciousness and how they were greeted there by my mind....not just sound but the sense of the sound and how the words won me and owned me....how I was transformed by them and by the alchemy of her love made a better me than I could ever hope to be.