Holidays - a change is as good...

I am definitely not a big holiday girl. It doesn't matter whether I get away once or twice a year to the same old, same old resort, just to drink sangria and bask in sun-shine.  Most of my childhood, my parents were too busy to take holidays for more than a few days.  We had a few, very pleasant short breaks but never more than a week. They had a pub to run, four of us to provide for and Summer was the busiest time of year, after Christmas, Easter and Spring Bank.

From being young, I had a list.  A list of places that I would like to see and things that I would like to do. It is over fifty years since I began the list and there are still things outstanding but for the most part, they have been seen, visited, attempted, mastered and ticked off.  I am very determined and hate to give up on anything, as anyone who knows me well, will confirm.

I have always achieved my goals, sometimes after a failed first attempt. Here are a few of the highlights so far.  I danced for my country in Switzerland at the age of ten and that same year danced in the Royal Albert Hall. I was the youngest Imperial Society Associate at 16 and began teaching dance the same year. I sang to a Steinway piano at the Glasgow School of Dramatic Art and Music aged 45 and won a photographic competition the same year. I swan with dolphins in Florida in 1997 and dropped 26 floors on the Terror Tower.  I have had close encounters with Red squirrels, badgers and have flown a Harris Hawk and a Barn owl.

I took my children to South Africa to see the big five and shook hands with a Zulu warrior, fulfilling a promise to my cousin made when I was 13. I took them to the Valley of The Kings, Karnack and Luxor - a promise I made to myself at eleven. I took them to Pompeii - another promise from my own school days.  I took them to see the Roman City of Ephesus - although this was really a lucky accident. I sailed round the Canaries in an ocean-going yacht, I flew over the Alps, I saw Courtney Pine perform live and I threw my own pottery. I gained a degree in English at 50, had a poem carved into a stone memorial in 2014. I performed in operetta on real theatre stage for the first time the same year.

Earlier this year I went to Crete for the first time and fulfilled one of the last biggies on the list.  The Palace at Knossos was everything that I had hoped it would be, from the description in Homer's Odyssey. The trip was the ultimate in wish-fulfilment and yet it had a depressive effect.  The list is almost completed.  There may be no more firsts to aim for.  I am not saying that there are no places left to go or things to accomplish. I have just done most of what I set out to do. The trouble is the highs are so great that the times in between seem a little low. 

Oh but then again, there is still India (a promise that I made to my father) and The Bolshoi to visit, La Scala in Milan, (not to sing - just to see) and I hope to learn to play an instrument some day, perhaps sing in a band. I might try to get a painting hung in the Royal Academy or fly a light aircraft.  I still haven't been to Cornwall or been up in helicopter - so watch this space. And like all writers there are still books I want to have published. Like I said at the beginning, I am not much of a holiday person but just, "to live would be a really big adventure". JM Barrie. Peter Pan.

I must say that though - I am sure the onset of this season is why holidays were invented...

Summer’s End  

Season of drips and sodden wetness, 

as sudden bursts cloud over

seeping down our trench coat necks
and torrents wash from
overflowing gutter pipes.

Wipers beat a frantic rhythm,
swishing to swipe clear
cascading curtains that blur
the blinded dashers,  
umbrellas turned to face the wind.

There is persistent drumming

on the hatchback roof  
but on the high street,
a beacon beckons,
selling sunshine and blue skies.

Windows offer Canarias,

or Caribbean cruises,
as super-moon high-tides
smash and swamp the promenade,
retreating with a foaming swill.

Next day the wind is gone,

the sky is clear, the soft sun shines
and switched off chlorophyl
displays deep red hues of jasmine
left clinging to the garden fence.

Ah, we are in England

now that Autumn’s here.
Conkers shine in leaf falls,
fire smokes over garden walls,
berries burst to ripe.

And before we go to sleep

we store away for Winter’s keep,
shake out the struggle rugs
and snuggle up to ear-mark
kinder shores in glossy brochures.

Happy Holiday Planning Season everyone.  Thanks for reading.  Adele

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Wine - a poetic tasting.

According to Persian mythology, wine was discovered by a woman. She drank the fermented juice from grapes stored in a jar, went to sleep, and surprisingly woke up cured of a headache, instead of suffering from the world's first hangover as one might have expected. The classical period of Arab civilisation spawned a rich corpus of Bacchic poetry, which had its roots in pre-Islamic Arabia.  

(Last night I could not sleep) so give me to drink of the

maiden wine who has donned the grey locks of old age

whilst still in the womb;

A wine which (when poured) is replenished with youth…

One preserved for a day when its seal is pierced, though

             It is the confidant of Time itself;

It has been aged, such that if it were possessed of an

            eloquent tongue,

It would sit proudly amongst people and tell a tale of an a

             ancient time.  
                                                            P.K.

‘Khamriyya’, The Encylopedia of Islam (new edn.) vol.iv (Leiden, 1978). 998 -1009  

My father kept a copy of The Rubayat of Omar Kyam with him,  throughout his five years of service with the Royal Corps of Signals during WW2.  After visiting the following verses, I am not surprised that he became a publican, he liked a drink but never before 9 in the evening and never to excess.  

And David’s lips are locket; but in divine

High-piping Pehlevi, with “Wine! Wine! Wine!

Red Wine!” the Nightingale cries to the Rose

That sallow cheek of hers t’ incarnadine. 

Come, fill the Cup, and in the fire of Spring

Your Winter-garment of Repentance fling:

The Bird of Time has but a little way

To flutter–and the Bird is on the Wing. 

Whether at Naishapur or Babylon,

Whether the Cup with sweet or bitter run,

The Wine of Life keeps oozing drop by drop,

The Leaves of Life keep falling one by one.

Then to the lip of this poor earthen Urn

I lean’d, the Secret of my Life to learn:

And Lip to Lip it murmur’d–“While you live

Drink!–for, once dead, you never shall return.” 

Perplext no more with Human or Divine,

To-morrow’s tangle to the winds resign,

And lose your fingers in the tresses of

The Cypress–slender Minister of Wine. 

And if the Wine you drink, the Lip you press

End in what All begins and ends in–Yes;

Think then you are To-day what Yesterday

You were–To-morrow You shall not be less. 

So when that Angel of the darker

Drink At last shall find you by the river-brink,

And, offering his Cup, invite your

Soul Forth to your Lips to quaff–you shall not shrink. 

For “Is” and “Is-not” though with Rule and Line

And “Up” and “Down” by Logic I define,

Of all that one should care to fathom,

Was never deep in anything but–Wine. 

And lately, by the Tavern Door agape,

Came shining through the Dusk an Angel Shape

Bearing a Vessel on his Shoulder; and

He bid me taste of it; and ’twas–the Grape! 

The Grape that can with Logic absolute

The Two-and-Seventy jarring Sects confute:

The sovereign Alchemist that in a trice

Life’s leaden metal into Gold transmute. 

 

 

 

 

Wine became the drink of the gods, whether they were Egyptian, Sumerian, or Greek: The early eities of wine were often women, since they were also associated with fertility. The symbolism of wine, as well as its effect, became potent as it was adopted into religious ritual. Another source of potent images, the sea, which was crucial to early transport and communication, was given the feminine gender by the Greeks. When the ancient Greek poet Homer sang of "the wine-dark sea" he was linking two forces central in Mediterranean life to create an image which continues to have great emotive power.

 Li Qingzhao was a Chinese poet of the Song dynasty. Born in Zhangqiu into a family of scholars, Qingzhao was unusually outgoing and knowledgeable of a woman of noble birth. Before she got married, her poetry was already well known within elite circles. Marrying Zhao Mingcheng in 1811, his absences for work fuelled a lot of her poetry, which is often imbued with yearning and explores the effects of wine on her thoughts and feelings.

Light mists and heavy clouds,

melancholy the long dreay day,

In the golden censer

the burning incense is dying away.

It is again time

for the lovely Double-Nith Festival;

The coolness of midnight

penetrates my screen of sheer silk

and chills my pillow of jade.

After drinking wine at twilight

under the chrysanthemum hedge,

My sleeves are perfumed

by the faint fragrance of the plants.

Oh, I cannot say it is not enchanting,

Only, when the west wind stirs the curtain,

I see that I am more graceful

than the yellow flowers.

  

And by all accounts, the Victorian romantic poets drank a surfeit of wine on their tours of Europe.  This extract from John Keats, Ode to a Nightingale. 

O, for a draught of vintage! That hath been
Cool’d a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country green,
Dance, and Provencal song, and sunburnt mirth!
O for a beaker full of the warm South,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stained mouth;
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim. 
 

I am not going to attempt to compete with any of the aforementioned poets but will end with a newly acquired poem, by Chilean poet and Nobel Prize for Literature winner, Pablo Neruda. It is a deep, rich poem with subtle hints of plum and Autumn fruits... 

Ode to Wine

Wine color of day

wine color of night

wine with your feet of purple

or topaz blood,

wine,

starry child of the earth,

wine, smooth as a golden sword,

soft as ruffled velvet,

wine spiral-shelled and suspended,

loving, of the sea,

you’ve never been contained in one glass,

in one song, in one man,

choral, you are gregarious

and, at least, mutual

memories;
on your wave

we go from tomb to tomb,

stonecutter of icy graves,

and we weep transitory tears,

but your beautiful spring suit is different,

the heart climbs to the branches,

the wind moves the day,

nothing remains in your motionless soul.

Wine stirs the spring,

joy grows like a plant,

walls, large rocks fall,

abysses close up, song is born.

Oh thou, jug of wine, in the desert

with the woman I love,

said the old poet.

Let the pitcher of wine and its kiss to the kiss of love.
 

My love, suddenly,

your hip

is the curve of the wineglass

filled to the brim,

your breast is the cluster,

your hair the light of alcohol

your nipples, the grapes

your navel pure seal stamped on your belly of a barrel,

and your love the cascade of unquenchable wine,

the brightness that falls on my sense

the earthen splendour of life. 
 

But you are more than love,

burning kiss

of ignited heart-

vino de vida, you are also

fellowship, transparency,

chorus of discipline abundance of flowers.

I love the light of a bottle of intelligent wine

upon a table

when people are talking,

that they drink it,

that in each drop of gold

or ladle of purple,

they remember that autumn worked

until the barrels were filled with wine

and let the obscure man learn,

in the ceremony of his business,

to remember the soil and his duties,

to propagate the canticle of the fruit. 

Pablo Neruda. 1954

 

Raise your glasses, lads and lasses.  Thanks for reading - Adele

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Creeping On Midnight

Quick, it's creeping on midnight and I've a Saturday blog to write. Topic? Revenant...

Bloody hell! Get out of that one! No - wait, that's actually it, isn't it? Phew, lucky strike. Getting out of hell, bloody or otherwise and returning to whatever - that's the very essence of revenance, surely. (Checks dictionary just to make sure: one returned from the dead or from exile - probably French in origin...that figures!)

So what do we make of that?

Are we thinking reincarnation? Apparently it's making a comeback: "Life's a bitch and then you die get to do it all over again!" The Buddhist wheel and all that jazz.

Or zombies? Cue a plug for Zombieland (2009, directed by Ruben Fleischer), the funniest and my favourite zombie movie, starring Jesse Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson, Emma Stone, Abigail Breslin and Bill Murray (as himself).

Or the exile angle? Two of my favourite books are Homer's 'Odyssey' and Hardy's 'Return Of The Native' - and I've returned to both of them on more than one occasion. Highly recommended.

Or the tale of the time I gate-crashed the prestigious Revenant of the Year awards? The late and the great were gathered together on a night of high anxiety and I, the quick among the dead, was passing through this throng of wraiths, trying to get to the heart of the action but wary of the Groke. Just as I was pressing forward to see who was commanding all the attention on the grey carpet, who was leading the ghostly parade, the first rays of the rising sun fingered the palace of dust, and  methought it was time to move smartly on.

Quick. Today's poem, it's a little something not precisely on theme - return from the dead or from exile - but making a comeback (for want of anything else) from my early pages and descriptive of that death-in-life sensation bordering on near paralysis that can sometimes be induced from a too rigorous pursuit of the recreational...

Low
I'm closed in
with dank flowers
in a rank corner.

The sun,
my only mourner,
has fled to bed
leaving moonlight magic
to raise its silver head.

I'm sunk so low
I might be dead
or damned at best
to lie forever
at infernal rest.

Thanks for reading. Have an invigorating week, S ;-)

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Taliesin's Drum

Before we created written language to signify words, we used tally marks to signify numbers.  You might say, therefore that numbers are more essential than words.  Not so.  Rather, we were good enough at using oral language that creating a permanent symbol of that language was not deemed necessary for a long time. 

Oral storytelling, like traditional poetry, is rhythmical in nature and hence incorporates numbers.  Traditional Homeric verse was composed in numerical form, specifically hexameter, consisting of 6 feet, usually dactyls which are made of 3 syllables.  These numbers, the rhythm, were essential to the mnemonic feat of recounting a story which consisted of several hours' material.  But more than that, research has shown that this rhythm is capable of regulating heart rate and respiration.  In other words, it has a relaxing effect on the person who reads it. 

The rhythm of dactylic hexameter can be found in music.  As Steve pointed out yesterday, there is a strong link between verse and music.  The waltz is perhaps the most obvious example of music in triple time which uses a dactyl-like rhythm: Tum ti ti, tum ti ti, tum ti ti, tum ti ti.  This rhythm can also be found in Handel's Sarabande, Amazing Grace, and Toad the Wet Sprocket's Walk on the Ocean.

While maths and difficult logical thought required writing to develop, however, storytelling and verse were created without the need for marks.  This is because the rhythm of the stories that we tell, the ballads, the sonnets, the songs, come from inside us.  We feel our way into a poem.  Certain sounds and rhythms fit around a description in a way which says more than the words alone manage.  We arrange the sounds in such a way that their effect, when heard, forms a pattern.  Because we do love patterns don't we?  And recognising the patterns is one of the pleasures that we find hard to resist. 

Patterns, rhythms, connect us to our bodies.  They remind us of our heartbeat, of our respiration.  They mimic the motion of the waves, the call of birds, the gentle (or not) back and forth of fucking.  Patterns suggest nature and there's nothing more intricate or beautiful than nature.  So when we create patterns, rhythms, we are mimicking Gaia herself.  When we recognise a pattern in art, we pay attention because here is something a human has created which is potentially an echo of the heart of existence. 

Numbers are not a separate entity to art.  They exist at its centre.  But unlike those traders who carved notches into bark, poets don't need to keep track of their numbers in the visual realm.  Our numbers are the invisible patterns around which we tie our ribbons of thought in the hope that someone will unwrap the colourful bows, discover an echo and pass the revelation on in a Chinese whisper so that eventually we all grow a little closer to the truth.

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Knocking Down the Walls

by Jessica Bell

Today I’m supposed to be discussing the difference between narrative and lyric poetry. You know, I could do that. I could tell you that “lyric” comes from the ancient Greek instrument, the lyre, and that the Greeks used to always sing their poetry to its accompaniment. I could also tell you that lyric poems resemble songs in three distinct ways: they are shorter than epic (narrative) poetry, they usually express the thoughts of the poet, and they often give you the feeling they can be sung.

On that note, I’d also mention that epic (narrative) poetry stems from Greek too. From the word “epos,” which means to speak or to tell a tale. Homer’s Iliad is and example of an epic poem. So is the Odyssey. Epic poems are supposed to enhance the reader’s sense of good and evil, by focusing on the heroism of a certain individual that is a symbol of strength, virtue, courage … really I could go on and on telling you what these forms of poetry are and bore the crikeyness out of you. So let me tell you a little something about myself …

I hate rules. I love to learn them, however, and I love to know that I know them. But rarely do I utilize them, and rarely do I label poetry as this, that, and the other. Poetry, to me, is art. There are no limits to art. You can’t pigeon hole it. This is another reason why I don’t much like ‘genres’ in fiction. But that’s a completely different discussion.

The ‘type’ or style of poem, ultimately has no significant meaning. They’re there for scholars to refer to in their lectures and print in their theses, so … Narrative or Lyric? Who cares! Does your poem evoke emotion? Yes? Then you’re good to go in my book. Does your poem keep me engaged? Does it make me want to read more of it? Does it use vocabulary creatively, avoid cliché, kick me in the gut and make me want to write like you? Does it make me email all my friends and tell them to check out this new and upcoming genius? Does it make me read the same poem over and over and over and find new meaning in it with every reading? Yes? Brilliant. Then keep doing what you’re doing.

And if you’ve mixed and matched various forms of poetry to create your own, then you deserve a standing ovation. Because seriously, rules can suck the life out of art … they can also enhance it, but again, that’s another discussion, and maybe Vicky can invite me back one day to tell you what I think about that. So I’ll just leave you with this:

Don’t ever listen to people who begin a sentence with, “You can’t do that because … .”

You can do that. Do it. And show everybody how it’s done.



Jessica Bell Online:

Website
String Bridge (a novel)
Retreat & workshop
Blog
Vine Leaves Journal
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