I, the Last of the Donalls...lost in my Curragh Camp, Kildare, Ireland childhood...caught up in the writing of Mr. J.F. Cooper.

Never wanted to be Natty Bumppo but one day I would be Chingachgook or Uncas the next
as I wandered through the Curragh plantation or roamed its 5000 acres in search of adventure! And oh the tales I told to myself!

Enivrez-vous, Charles Baudelaire

Poem appeared in Le Spleen de Paris or Petits poèmes en prose (published posthumously, 1869). Translated (liberally!) by Jon Andrews.

Enivrez-vous.
Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867).

Il faut être toujours ivre. Tout est là: c’est l’unique question.

Pour ne pas sentir l’horrible fardeau du Temps qui brise vos épaules et vous penche vers la terre, il faut vous enivrer sans trêve.

Mais de quoi? De vin, de poésie, ou de vertu, à votre guise. Mais enivrez-vous.

Et si quelquefois, sur les marches d’un palais, sur l’herbe verte d’un fossé, dans la solitude morne de votre chambre, vous vous réveillez, l’ivresse déjà diminuée ou disparue,

demandez au vent, à la vague, à l’étoile, à l’oiseau, à l’horloge, à tout ce qui fuit, à tout ce qui gémit, à tout ce qui roule, à tout ce qui chante, à tout ce qui parle, demandez quelle heure il est;

et le vent, la vague, l’étoile, l’oiseau, l’horloge, vous répondront: “Il est l’heure de s’enivrer!

Pour n’être pas les esclaves martyrisés du Temps, enivrez-vous; enivrez-vous sans cesse! De vin, de poésie ou de vertu, à votre guise.

* * * * *

Drink.
Always be drunk. Therein lies everything: it’s all that matters.
So as not to feel the dread burden of Time breaking your shoulders and crushing you to the earth, never stop drinking.
But what? Whether wine, poetry or virtue, the choice is yours. Whatever: get drunk.
And if sometimes, on the palace steps, in the gutter’s green grass, or in the maudlin solitude of your room, you wake up, and the drunken haze has dwindled or gone,
then ask the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock; ask everything that flees, everything that groans, everything that moves, everything that sings, everything that speaks: ask them what time it is;
and the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, and the clock will all reply:
“It is the drinking hour”.
To escape the fate of those tormented slaves of Time, get drunk.
Drink deep, never ceasing.
Whether wine, poetry, or virtue, the choice is yours.

Shadows look curiously 3-D in fog....and more real than us...I was thinking of Shakespeare's lines lost in the mists of my mind and walking with my little Tilly to milk the cows and see the new calf that had only arrived the other night. She had rushed in to tell me that there was a cloud fallen in the field and it was asleep. It was the first fog she have ever seen and this was her reasoned argument for it.  We had to use the words "Fog, Lost, Directionless, Echo and Homeless" for the ideas to latch onto in the poem but not used the actual words themselves....say them without saying them....this was my attempt at doing that.

There is a photo of me and my Da heading off to Sunday mass in our Sunday best. I am holding his hand and so proud that this man is my Da and totally in love with the moment. In mass we will sing Be Thou My Vision and it will be an epiphany. This is the moment I will be remembering when the doc throws us out for a while and I go out to the nearby park. Everything I saw and there was nothing much to see...******* and shadows....joggers and swans and a dog that could not be seen. The dog was in a housing estate a good bit away but his bark was right beside you. A swan was sitting on a park bench and wouldn't let anyone else sit on it. The music leaking from the jogger's headphones and she trundled by me in pink spandex was...The Little Drummer Boy. This in March? When the doc let me back in Da wanted to know everything I had seen down to the littlest detail. He was able to tell me that when a swan goes loco with you...it is called busking. He was always able to tell me such tiny bits of knowledge. Even the shadow on the ***** grass got gulped down by his mind. Only after did I realise that all these details of things he knew he would never see again. They had become precious...even the mud...even the rain. In my mind when he was dying I would sing to him all the songs and hymns I sang with him in all the different Da's he was.

The old Irish version of the hymn says it all for me>

Be thou my father, be I thy son.
Mayst thou be mine, may I be thine.

Rop tussu m'athair, rob mé do mac-su;
rop tussu lem-sa, rob misse lat-su.

Such intense love....an immensity held in these scrappy details of a nothing day.

I saw these things when I was seven and I felt them intensely but had no words for them...I knew them but didn't know how to know them in words. I can still see and feel them to this very day so I thought surely now I have the words to explore them...I only had to wait 54 years to be able to explore them....this is an attempt to capture the beauty that overwhelmed the child but took seed in him and hopefully bloomed into being once again. One attaches words to things only to see the words fall off! Some of these words have appeared to held on!

These are the 'non-times" or times of no apparent consequences...remembered bits of nothing where the sense of a sense of things and how the world comes to invade my little head...where the thought can think itself but can't express itself in those building blocks of uselessness we call words.

They are of importance only in the fleeting sketch of my me-ness as it encountered a world that grew organically out of the time I was planted in. This is the place between second and second where the world comes into being.

I used to save up all my little pennies throughout the whole year to get my Ma "4711" and me Da "Old Spice." These were their perpetual presents but they always pretended surprise. Then there would be the trek through falling snow to enter this magical store and to have it assault one's senses and zing all around you. I can still feel my hand in my big sister's hand...our footsteps echoing into the long long ago. This little scrap of remembrance is a little treasure that I hoard...real emotional treasure more gorgeous than gold.

50th Anniversary of the moon landing and when in Naples heard Stevie singing it in Italian on a passing car radio. Loved the song from the moment it came out(about 2 months after the historic one giant leap)and hearing it was again stuck in the middle of a Naples torrential downpour. Then in Leicester Square on a surprisingly sunny day( the next day it would pour with rain)we encountered a little busking band in German get-up  and a Sousaphone player delighting us with Stevie's Sir Duke and yes Yester-Me, Yester-You, Yesterday. Sometimes the past wraps you up in its warmth and puts an imaginary arm around your shoulder.

All the way from the boy Wonder himself from his MY CHERIE AMOUR album. "Yester-Me, Yester-You, Yesterday" was written by Ron Miller and Bryan Wells. At that time, it was Wonder's biggest UK hit.

Stevie was going through some vocal problems and was required to wait before recording a song. Due to this, instead of making Wonder record new ones, they decided to release songs that he had recorded years earlier, and this song was one of them (it was recorded two years earlier).

YESTER-ME, YESTER-YOU, YESTERDAY

What happened to the world we knew
when we would dream and scheme and while the time away
I have a dream, so did you
Life was warms, love was true
Two kids who followed all the rules, yester-fools
and now, now it seems those yester-dreams were just a cruel
and foolish game we used to play
yester-me, yester-you, yesterday
Where did it go, that yester-glow
When we could feel the wheel of life turn our way
Yester-me, yester-you, yester-day
When I recall what we had
I feel lost, I feel sad
With nothing but the mem'ry of yester-love
and now now it seems those yester-dreams were just a cruel
and foolish game we used to play
yester-me, yester-you, yester-day

And it Italiano...SOLO TE, SOLO ME, SOLO NOI

Solo te, solo me, solo noi
Solo te,
solo me,
solo noi

Ricordo che,
due giorni fa,
con te ** scoperto una grande verità

Solo te,
solo me,
solo noi

Yeah
Parole che,
sai dire tu
con un sorriso dai profondi occhi tuoi

Solo te,
solo me,
solo noi

Intorno a noi,
la città non c'è più,
non c'è più
e m'è rimasto solo quello
che noi viviamo
Da quando tu
quando tu
sei qui con me
la nostra vita, sì, è bella così

Solo te,
solo me,
solo noi.

ONLY YOU, ONLY ME, ONLY US

Only you, only me, only us
Only you
Only me
Only us

I recall how
Two days ago
I discovered a splendid truth with you

Only you
Only me
Only us

Yeah
Words that
You know [well] how to tell
with a smile from the depths of your eyes

Only you
Only me
Only us

Around us
the city is no more
is no more
and I'm left with only
with what we're living
Ever since you
since you
have been by my side
our life, yes, like that is beautiful

Only you
only me
only us

“I want to make a book that will change all men. That will lead them where they never consented to go….a door simply ajar on reality,”

Antonin Artaud (1896 – 1948)

Times when I was only two times two and learning to put the world together and coming up with 7 and a half.

***

The title comes from James Clarence Mangan's  "King Cahal Mór Of The Wine-Red Hand" which phrase would be known to anyone of my generation experiencing an Irish childhood.

I walked entranced
Through a land of Morn:
The sun, with wondrous excess of light,
Shone down and glanced
Over seas of corn
And lustrous gardens aleft and right.
Even in the clime
Of resplendent Spain,
Beams no such sun upon such a land;
But it was the time,
‘T was in the reign,
Of Cahal Mór of the Wine-red Hand.

And the refrain comes back again and again but changing all the time...

"And it is the time,
These be the days,
Of Cahal Mór of the Wine-red Hand.”

“It is now the time
These be the years,
Of Cahal Mór of the Wine-red Hand.”

"That I dreamed this dream
Of the time and reign
Of Cahal Mór of the Wine-red Hand."

But my love of this refrain is far far ahead of me as I am only three and a tree is just another being and the world blooms into my mind. I am totally in love with my world and the world is totally in love with me!

***

"He that by the plough would thrive, Himself must either hold or drive."

Italian Proverb.

The title is taken of course from Hardy's
  In Time of ‘The Breaking of Nations’

which I learnt as a schoolboy way back in the day and Uncle would get me to say as we set off across the fields...it was a poem "he could be."

                        I
Only a man harrowing clods
    In a slow silent walk
With an old horse that stumbles and nods
    Half asleep as they stalk.

                       II
Only thin smoke without flame
    From the heaps of couch-grass;
Yet this will go onward the same
    Though Dynasties pass.

                       III
Yonder a maid and her wight
    Come whispering by:
War’s annals will cloud into night
    Ere their story die.


Jennifer's mum...my aunt Peggy took the first colour photographs we had ever seen on a visit back to her home in Cork all the way from mythical Chicago. We were all amazed to see that Uncle Michael's green corduroy trousers were actually GREEN as if we needed to see a photo to tell us what our own eyes could see...but a photo made them more real. I always remember tracing my finger along the green furrows of his corduroy as well as tagging along behind him as he ploughed with Dolly and all his commands which if I copied...Dolly only laughed at...she was only in love with my uncle's voice...as I was...he was a great teller of tales and could make up worlds of his own all on his own to my great surprise and delight.

I still follow in his furrows as the tilled land goes on forever as does this one stolen moment. I remember how hard it was to lift a leg with the amount of earth stuck to it making it almost impossible to make the next footstep.

I tried to copy everything about him...his gait...his tone of voice...his tongue stuck firmly in his cheek...his lovely laugh. His mind. His wonderful wonderful mind....that...made a poet of me.

A girlfriend once invited me to meet her folks. She said that she wanted to see a lot more of me! I thought this was promising! What she neglected to tell me was that all her family were nudists so that I met Mummy and Daddy and granny all in the buff! When I arrived there was a notice on the door informing me that" "It's open...come into the back garden!" And so it was I first met Prudence alias Mummy! They were such a lovely lot of people and in time I shed my inhibitions and became as they were! It was much easier than being dressed when everyone else was not!

***

By 1906, Proust’s parents had died, his brother had married, and he felt the family residence was too big. He moved to 102 Boulevard Haussmann(in the Ian Fleming novel Thunderball, it is described as "the solidest street in Paris" and the site of the headquarters of SPECTRE.) a building owned by his Uncle Louis, where he wrote the bulk of his work, mostly in bed.

Today the building belongs to the CIC bank, which has restored the bedroom, famously lined in cork for soundproofing, but the room’s contents are in the Musée Carnavalet, leaving the solitary chamber soulless..the silence listening to us not making a sound.
SPECTRE in some fictional alternative world still has its headquarters on Boulevard Haussmannn...a fact of which I was totally unaware being pulverised by rain and time....the moment coming apart at the seams.

A reconstruction, with original furniture, of the room where Marcel Proust wrote In search of lost time can be seen in Musée Carnavalet.

Off in a cramped corner were the reassembled pieces of furniture from Proust’s bedroom, including a five-paneled Chinese screen, a velvet armchair that belonged to his father and a writing desk, used mostly for piling books. He kept his notebooks and writing materials on an old rosewood end table beside the bed. Two other tables are adrift in this cramped tableau, one of which was used for his morning coffee tray, usually served with milk and croissants.

The original Boulevard Haussmann apartment was spacious but crammed with furniture, with double windows always covered by padded blue satin drapes. The bedspread was blue satin as well and there was a chandelier, which was never lit when Proust was working. The only light was from a long-stemmed, green-shaded lamp on the bedside table.

We were headed for the Musée Jacquemart-André, at 158 Boulevard Haussmann, the former home of banker and art collector Edouard André and his artist wife Nélie Jacquemart, recaptures the interior decor and lifestyle of respectable society. Proust was never a guest there, but he rotated in the same social circles, We were mere tourists...awed by the past.

As Beckett puts it in his essay on Proust...

"Life is habit. Or rather life is a succession of habits, since the individual is a succession of individuals; the world being a projection of the individual’s consciousness (an objectivation of the individual’s will, Schopenhauer would say), the pact must be continually renewed, the letter of safe-conduct brought up to date. The creation of the world did not take place once and for all time, but takes place every day. Habit then is the generic term for the countless treaties concluded between the countless subjects that constitute the individual and their countless correlative objects."

This poem is one of the countless treaties various individuals of me made with the moment in time that was mine being shared with Proust.

The enigma of the “little phrase” that “swept over and enveloped” Swann “like a perfume or a caress..." still lingers on as maybe Frack or as Proust admitted in a letter to Camille Saint-Saëns. I rather prefer Franck's Sonata in A major for Violin and Piano for its perfect cyclic beauty and its gentle reflectiveness.

But it was Franck's gorgeous Symphony in D minor( and the transformations of its four-bar theme )that I was lost in that day and became for me the "...national anthem of our love."

“It is only through art that we can escape from ourselves and know how another person sees a universe which is not the same as our own and whose landscapes would otherwise have remained as unknown as any there may be on the moon.”

The title comes from a lovely phrase that has always haunted me...

"...calmly imprisoned in the unending afternoon of her eyes..."

THE GUERMANTES WAY - MARCEL PROUST.

* * *

Our English teacher’s voice commanding us to open our books at Emily Dickinson. Doing as I was told...I glanced down shyly at her words looking bravely up at me and immediately at once I fell in love!

Our English teacher’s voice proclaiming “I don’t like teaching this woman…I don’t understand her! ”

Oh Emily, I knew you as you knew me and had already eloped with your mind leaving only the empty shell of a schoolboy for the teacher to shout at! Us laughing...running away together...running through the wild woods of words...gathering words and turning them into the daisy chain of poems.

Brian was the gentlest and nicest man...he had a great sense of humour and always greeted me with a big sweary hello. He was always delighted to see me and I him. He was a delight to be with. I knew he had been in the army but didn't know the where and when of it. One evening as we sat in his room with the sun bathing us in gold he suddenly came out with all of this...inside this lovely man was the practical let's-get-on-with-it killer....a job to be done no more. I've tried to keep his voice and his telling and the sense of self...letting him tell the story as he did that day without any comment.

Inspired by JAMES SHAPIRO'S COMPELLING 1599 - A YEAR IN THE LIFE OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE>

The 'theft" of their former theatre,The Theatre, which dismantled would become the famous wooden O. And Will watching( possibly ) when all of seven. . .the stained glass windows of his 'right goodly chapel" been smashed by a glazier who was paid 23 shillings and 8 pence for his smashing. These two images are what burned on in my mind.

I have often stood in that chapel and seen what remains of the whitewashed paintings now brought back to life. His dad had to order this whitewashing months before Will was born but by 7 Will could have been witness to the death of the coloured glass and all that was to be beheld there.

So this Midsummer's Day madness of 1571 really stated with me and forced the poem upon me.

"Popery may creep in at a glass window as well as at a door" as one William Prynne put it. The English Reformation going about its daily task to the dismay of the common folk who had to put up with the religion changing hands and changing hands yet again all in the little time of just over a quarter of a century.

Being a great lover of stained glass and its beauty this was what got me the most!

The title is from Will's Sonnet no. 5:

Those Hours that with gentle work did frame

"Beauty o'er --snowed, and bareness everywhere.
Then were not summer's distillation left
A liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass, "