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tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-88762062680579024892014-10-28T18:26:44.487ZAMAZING GRACEa place for all things literary - written from London by Grace AndreacchiGrace Andreacchihttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8876206268057902489.post-51428952695970411082013-08-02T14:08:00.001+01:002013-08-02T16:05:58.495+01:00The Triumph of Evil - The Short Life and Horrible Death of Daniel Pelka

Daniel Pelka was four years old when he died. He was beaten, tortured, locked in a closet, starved to the point of extreme emaciation. He was left in that closet without any toilet facilities, left to sleep on a bare, stinking mattress on the floor. He was held under in a cold bath until he lost consciousness. He was deliberately poisoned with salt. In the end he died of his injuries, slowly, over several hours, alone in that closet. The handle had been removed from the door, so that he had no chance of escape - not that a four year old child would ever have had a chance to escape anyhow. Police, when they finally came to Daniel's closet, found his tiny handprints smeared across that door. This week, Daniel's mother and her partner in crime were convicted of his murder.

10.21am - Sent by Luczak: 'Well now he's temporarily unconscious because I nearly drowned him. He's already in bed covered with the duvet and asleep and I am having some quiet time.'

10.24am - Sent by Luczak: 'I won't be hitting him but if I hear him when he later wakes up then he's going back to the bathtub. I didn't let the water out.'

12.11pm - Sent by Luczak: 'I'm leaving these marks of yours to you as they aren't coming off.'

4.34pm - Sent by Luczak to Krezolek, as Daniel lay dying of a brain injury: 'He'll get over it by tomorrow. There is no point to stress ourselves out and to call an ambulance because that will cause proper problems.'

Daniel Pelka went to the Little Heath Primary School in Coventry, right up to the time of his death. He was seen by teachers every day. He was starving to death before their eyes. The doctors who examined his corpse said it was similar to that of 'a concentration camp victim'. The teachers say they did all they could. They 'referred the case' along the proper channels. His mother said he had a rare eating disorder.

"In January, Daniel's class teacher Lisa Godfrey wrote in a school concerns book that he had bruises around his neck which she feared Luczak had caused while trying to 'strangle him'.The following month, she alerted Mr Clews [the school head] when Daniel had black eyes. But, in court, Mr Clews claimed it was not serious enough to go in the concerns book."

[from the press]

I repeat, Daniel Pelka was FOUR YEARS OLD. Four. He comes into school with two black eyes and it's 'not serious enough'?

The people who murdered this child were evil. I have no hesitation in using that word. Evil is real, Satan's power is also real. We need only assent to it, and we are his. That is why these powerful words are part of the Christian baptismal liturgy:

V. Do you reject Satan?
R. I do.
V. And all his works?
R. I do.
V. And all his empty promises?
R. I do.

"But I've still better things about children. I've collected a great, great deal about Russian children, Alyosha. There was a little girl of five who was hated by her father and mother, 'most worthy and respectable people, of good education and breeding.' You see, I must repeat again, it is a peculiar characteristic of many people, this love of torturing children, and children only. To all other types of humanity these torturers behave mildly and benevolently, like cultivated and humane Europeans; but they are very fond of tormenting children, even fond of children themselves in that sense. It's just their defenselessness that tempts the tormentor, just the angelic confidence of the child who has no refuge and no appeal, that sets his vile blood on fire. In every man, of course, a demon lies hidden—the demon of rage, the demon of lustful heat at the screams of the tortured victim, the demon of lawlessness let off the chain, the demon of diseases that follow on vice, gout, kidney disease, and so on."

"This poor child of five was subjected to every possible torture by those cultivated parents. They beat her, thrashed her, kicked her for no reason till her body was one bruise. Then, they went to greater refinements of cruelty—shut her up all night in the cold and frost in a privy, and because she didn't ask to be taken up at night (as though a child of five sleeping its angelic, sound sleep could be trained to wake and ask), they smeared her face and filled her mouth with excrement, and it was her mother, her mother did this. And that mother could sleep, hearing the poor child's groans! Can you understand why a little creature, who can't even understand what's done to her, should beat her little aching heart with her tiny fist in the dark and the cold, and weep her meek unresentful tears to dear, kind God to protect her? Do you understand that, friend and brother, you pious and humble novice? Do you understand why this infamy must be and is permitted? Without it, I am told, man could not have existed on earth, for he could not have known good and evil. Why should he know that diabolical good and evil when it costs so much? Why, the whole world of knowledge is not worth that child's prayer to 'dear, kind God'! I say nothing of the sufferings of grown-up people, they have eaten the apple, damn them, and the devil take them all! But these little ones! I am making you suffer, Alyosha, you are not yourself. I'll leave off if you like."

"Never mind. I want to suffer too," muttered Alyosha.
[The Brothers Karamazov]

Me too, I want to suffer too. And want you, my dear Reader, to suffer for at least a minute or two for the sake of Daniel Pelka. I have a son named Daniel myself. He's a man now, but he was once a small defenseless child. Nobody locked him in a closet. Nobody beat him or starved him, The demon was not fed. The child was. This other little Daniel was not so lucky.

We know that men and women can do terrible things. And we know that God, in his supposed wisdom, permits us to do these things. Personally, I've got a few questions for Him about that. Personally, I am with Ivan, and return Him the ticket to a paradise that was built on this cruelty.

But God is beyond our reach. The teachers at the Little Heath Primary School, the Head Teacher at the time of Daniel's murder, Mr. Darren Clews, the medical team who closed his case when his mother said he broke his arm falling off a sofa (no - he didn't fall off a cliff, or out of a tree, but 'off a sofa'), the parents who saw him day after day in the schoolyard - these are not inscrutable gods, but men and women with children of their own whom, presumably, they love and cherish. People who go home, after the spectacle of this starving, suffering child before their eyes all day long, and cuddle their own children, and feed them their dinners, and tuck them in at night in warm beds (no, surely they don't lock them into freezing closets to sleep upon filthy mattresses alone in the pitch dark, surely their little handprints will not be found in the morning smeared across handleless doors...) these people, who saw Daniel Pelka dying before their eyes every day, did nothing.

Oh, no sorry, that's not right. They followed the proper procedures. They made the proper referrals.

February 2012: Daniel attends school with two black eyes. He is seen eating a discarded pancake covered in dirt and grit.

Thursday, 1 March 2012: Daniel takes a half-eaten piece of fruit from a rubbish bin at school, and eats it. Sometime during the following hours he is beaten about the head and left to die in his closet.

It has been said that all that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing. During the reign of terror that the Nazi regime brought to a large part of Europe in the mid-twentieth century there were a few people (not many, but a few) who risked their lives to save others. When asked why they had done it, risked their lives, their livelihoods, the lives of their own families to save strangers they give always the same answer. 'I only did what I had to. I did what anyone would have done. I really had no choice...'

Here's what Irena Sendlerowa, to name just one, has to say about her role in saving hundreds of Jewish children from certain death:

"I was brought up to believe that a person must be rescued when drowning, regardless of religion and nationality."

"The term 'hero' irritates me greatly. The opposite is true. I continue to have pangs of conscience that I did so little."

If Daniel Pelka had been run over in the street outside the Little Heath Primary School, can we imagine that the teachers, or the Head, or the parents who saw this happen would have thought - 'No, I won't phone an ambulance - it's not my job...' There is something about a system that makes cowardice appear plausible, even wise. Suppose for a moment that one person - just one! A teacher, a nurse, a parent - anybody - had stuck his neck out for Daniel. Had gone to the police, to 'social services', to somebody, anybody and screamed and insisted and stood there not once, but day after day, until something was done. Daniel would have been rescued from the beast that feeds upon the tears of children. Daniel would be alive today. And what would have happened to that brave person who made a stand and saved a human child? Would he have been taken off and shot? I don't think so. He might well have lost his job. Nothing worse.

There are no heroes in this story, only greater and lesser villains. No heroes except for little Daniel Pelka, who suffered what he could not escape with the dignity of innocence wronged. Daniel's story probably would not have made the news were it not the 'silly season', midsummer when news is slow and slower. A child is killed by his parents at the rate of one a week in this country. Good people continue to do nothing.

*

Photograph: Daniel Pelka at school

Grace Andreacchihttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8876206268057902489.post-40730567985081650592013-06-24T09:38:00.000+01:002013-06-24T22:13:16.029+01:00BREASTS ARE BEAUTIFUL - VIRGO DIVINO NIMIUM

The beautiful image of the nursing mother, an eternal image if ever there was one, has almost been erased from modern Christian iconography. When did we decide there is something 'dirty' about a woman's breasts? Something to make us snigger and point? Presumably some time shortly after the appearance of the feeding bottle. The Virgin feeding the infant Jesus at her breast has a long history in Christian art and iconography, and is celebrated in the little poem 'Virgo Divino Nimium', known nowadays, if at all, for its delicate musical setting by the 16th century Spanish composer, Francisco Guerrero.

Even today, Mary engaged in this simple human act of nourishing her baby is able to inspire love and devotion. In the Philippines, such an image is now frequently to be found in the neonatal wards and hospital chapels. Our Lady of le Leche, as she is known, is honoured as the patroness of mothers and mothers-to-be, just as Guerrero set out to honour her with his lovely motet, all those years ago.

Over the years corruptions crept into the text, and the version published today has several errors that rob the verses of their original meaning. So when I heard it performed recently at a concert of sacred music at Christ Church Spitalfields, I was sure that what I was hearing could not be right! Fortunately help was close at hand. Many thanks to Daniel Hadas of King's College London, who has emended the text and provided the following translation. And thanks as well to the fine musicians of the Cardinall' Musick, for bringing this beautiful music back into the light.

Virgo divino nimium favore plena,
mortalem supra diva sexum,
salva sis. Tecum Dominus.
perenne accipe votum.

Sancta pro nobis genitum precator.
Quippe tu sola poteris benignum reddere
et sontes facere expiatos
si ubera monstres.

*

Virgin, most full of divine favour,
holy above the mortal sex,
May you be well. The Lord is with you.
Receive an eternal prayer.

Holy one, pray to the (one you have) begotten for us.
Indeed, you only can make him kindly
and make the guilty forgiven,
if you show your breasts.

*

Francisco Guerrero performed by the Cardinall's Musick

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Picture: Madonna surrounded by Cherubim and Seraphim, from the Melun Diptych, Jean Fouqet, c. 1452

Grace Andreacchihttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8876206268057902489.post-68715405507803679072013-06-20T10:11:00.001+01:002013-06-20T11:16:56.154+01:00'Papa John' - A Tribute to John Ruskin

One man who has had a deep influence on my writing and indeed on my life is the great Victorian thinker and visionary, John Ruskin. I first encountered him in his role as art critic when researching the history of Venice, a place he more or less put on the cultural map. Before his revolutionary work 'The Stones of Venice', the city was more renowned as an international playground for the privileged than as a mecca for art lovers. Byron, for example, makes much of midnight assignations in gondolas but barely mentions the strange beauty of the place itself – it serves as a mere operatic backdrop to his admittedly engaging adventures. Ruskin's 'The Stones of Venice', 'Modern Painters' – these books made a revolution in how we look at art. But they are about so much more than art, or they are about art in the deepest sense, the only sense that John Ruskin ever saw in it – the sense of life at its most profound. For him there is no possible division between life and art, between our vision of the world and the world itself. We are, and we become, what we make, and a direct line runs from heaven to earth, from Creator to created, down to the very bricks and paving stones of our modern cities.

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From Ruskin I learned to see with fresh eyes, to think always for oneself, to reject all 'received opinion' as most likely tosh. In Ruskin's day 'everybody knew' that the only great art was late Renaissance art. Ruskin had a look at it, turned up his nose, and pronounced it 'depraved and hideous'. In Ruskin's day 'everybody knew' that the works of the Italian painters of the quattrocento were ugly, primitive affairs, fit only for a primitive people. Ruskin had a look, thought it over, and declared them 'sublime'. If today we universally worship Botticelli's Venus as an icon of beauty, it is because Ruskin told us she was worth a second look.<o:p></o:p>

But he didn't stop there. His all-encompassing vision of the world compelled him to go beyond the realm of art into the great issues of politics and the fair society. His writings on politics and economics, so far ahead of their time, so revolutionary in their call to renounce empty and selfish gain for a brotherhood of generosity, had a profound influence on Tolstoy, Gandhi and early socialist thinkers. His understanding of the impact of industrialisation on the face of the earth was a first pointer in the direction of what was to become the ecological movement. He worked tirelessly for his ideals – lecturing on art and on politics, setting up working men's colleges, endowing museums, commissioning what he hoped would be beautiful buildings of visionary architecture for every man and woman to enjoy.

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But all this would have failed to move me – and so many others no doubt! were it not for the great irrefutable voice in which he spoke. John Ruskin was the greatest English novelist we never had. His use of language is simply in a class by itself. He thunders, like Niagara, a flood of gorgeous words, unstoppable, enchanting. There is simply no arguing with the man when in full flow, and he is rarely anything else. He was the greatest stylistic influence on the most revolutionary and important French writer of the early 20thcentury – Marcel Proust, and Proust learned English only in order to read him. The parallel adventures of 'The Two Boyhoods' in 'Modern Painters' for example (the boys in question being J.M.W. Turner and Giorgione) is as fine a piece of fiction as I ever wish to read. That it is also a brilliant piece of art criticism gives you some idea of the grace and dexterity that were uniquely his own.<o:p></o:p>

In the end he proved a fragile reed. The twin burdens of a neurotic Victorian childhood and a life spent tilting at windmills proved too much for him, and he gradually subsided into a mute madness, locked away in his modest home on Lake Coniston. You may visit it still, and Brantwood is a lovely place, very much alive with the spirit of the man who dwelt there. It was typical of the man I have come to think of as my very own 'Papa John' that even in madness he found something to admire, something to wonder at. In this letter to his close friend, Charles Eliot Norton, he describes a bout of madness and its effect upon him:<o:p></o:p>

'As far as I can judge, there is no threatening, for I sleep quite soundly, and long enough, and people say I am looking well. But it is curious that I really look back to all those illnesses, except some parts of the first, with a kind of regret to have come back to the world. Life and Death were so wonderful, mingled together like that the hope and fear, the scenic majesty of delusion so awful sometimes so beautiful. In this little room, where the quite prosy sunshine is resting quietly on my prosy table last year, at this very time, I saw the stars rushing at each other and thought the lamps of London were gliding through the night into a World Collision. I took my pretty Devonshire farm-girl Nurse for a Black Vision of Judgment; when I found I was still alive, a tinkly Italian organ became to me the music of the Spheres. Nothing was more notable to me through the illness than the general exaltation of the nerves of sight and hearing, and their power of making colour and sound harmonious as well as intense with alternation of faintness and horror of course. But I learned so much about the nature of Phantasy and Phantasm it would have been totally inconceivable to me without seeing, how the unreal and real could be mixed.'[1]<o:p></o:p>

'I learned so much!' I know of no other writer who learned half so much, nor gave half so much of himself for the knowledge. <o:p></o:p>

<o:p>Pictures: Caricature of Ruskin by Frederick Waddy; photo, John Ruskin in his prime</o:p>
More of my thoughts on John Ruskin: a short story, two poems, and an account of a journey to his beloved Lake District.

[1]Letter from John Ruskin to Charles Eliot Norton, written from Herne Hill, 15 March, 1883<o:p></o:p>

Grace Andreacchihttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8876206268057902489.post-64817620634991945292012-12-10T17:22:00.000Z2012-12-10T19:39:48.994ZPramoedya Ananta Toer - A Man for All Nations

It was the serendipitous moment of departure, on my first journey to Indonesia, that first drew my attention to the magnificent writer, Pramoedya Ananta Toer. Pram, as he is affectionately known in his native land, is one of those writers so good that reading him changes one's entire perception. There are Pram moments everywhere for me now - Pram beauties and Pram odours, Pram villains and Pram jokes and stupidities - one turns to another of the Initiates and says 'Isn't that just so Pram!' I use the word 'Initiates' with reason, for he is disgracefully under-read, virtually unknown and massively under-appreciated outside Indonesia. Let me tell you about this man, this marvelous teller of tales, and probably the most brilliant writer never to win the Nobel prize.

He was born in a small town in Java in 1925. He spent much of his adult life incarcerated, first as a guest of the Dutch East Indies' government; later the Indonesian authorities were to have the honour. He wrote the Buru Quartet while in prison, first by telling it - a long long tale to pass the time, to his fellow inmates. Later he was finally allowed to write it all down. Now just in case you're thinking, as I did, 'Oh no! I don't want to read a quartet of novels about Indonesia's struggle for independence! That will be worthy and dull, badly written by some poor ill-educated native of a once oppressed and now forgotten colony, and over-praised by guilt ridden ex-colonial critics' - just in case you might be thinking that sort of thing, I rush to assure you: Yes you DO want to read the Buru Quartet! Because it is no more 'about' Indonesia's historical struggles than War and Peace is about Russia's. It is about love and hate, guilt and beauty, tragedy and comedy, the whole damn human story. And what's more it is a work of the most tremendous refinement and literary sophistication. Pram is as epic as Brecht, as subtle as Flaubert, as ironical and funny as Sterne, as romantic as Shelley, as postmodern and clever as Br'er Rabbit, as magical as a whole barrel of South American surrealists, and as unique as the shadowy smiles on the faces that look back at you across the centuries from their sun-drenched hilltop at Borobudur.

Borobudur, Java

Here is a taste from Volume One, This Earth of Mankind: 'That eternally harassing, tantalizing future. Mystery! We will all eventually arrive there – willing or unwilling, with all our soul and body. And too often it proves to be a great despot. And so, in the end, I arrived too. Whether the future is a kind or a cruel god is, of course, its own affair. Humanity too often claps with just one hand.'

The tale begins with our narrator/hero Minke, and the name itself is a mystery, for the book opens with the statement: 'People called me Minke. My own name... for the time being, I need not tell it. Not because I'm crazy for mystery.' Why then? Minke, a schoolboy's nickname, might mean 'little monk', it might even mean 'monkey' - Minke himself is never quite sure. Like a monk, he's a man of pure heart and selfless devotion; like a monkey, he's full of tricks. Later, much later, hints are dropped that Minke may share an identity with the Indonesian revolutionary journalist Tirto Adi Suryo, but by now the reader can have no doubt how much he also shares with the author.

Pramoedya Ananta Toer as a Young Man

The Buru Quartet takes its name from the obscure island where Pram passed his long years of imprisonment. He must have had time enough, poor fellow, to meditate upon all things great and small, but that he did so to such astonishing effect is the measure of his intellect. In one of the most moving scenes of This Earth of Mankind, Minke's mother is leading him through the traditional rites that must accompany his marriage as a Javanese 'raden mas' (a high-ranking aristocrat). As he struggles to overcome his reluctance, as a self-declared 'modern man', to satisfy his mother's wishes, she tells him of the 'five attributes of a knight of Java': house, woman, horse, bird, and keris. The house, because 'without a house, a person can never be a knight. He can only be a tramp.' Woman is 'the centre around which circles and from which comes, the giving of life and life itself.' The horse 'will carry you on your journeys', be they intellectual, material, or spiritual. But my own favourite is the bird:

'The fourth, the bird, is a symbol of beauty, of distraction, of everything that has no connection with simple physical survival, of only the satisfaction of one's soul. Without this, people are only soulless lumps of stone.'

Pitta elegans, native to Indonesia

Surely this is a knighthood not unfamiliar to our western troubadours, who sent their songs, bird-like, across the seas and over the castle walls to a distant, unobtainable Beloved. And Pram himself, a tiny bird-like man, sat perched night after night inside his cage on Buru Island singing, ever so sweetly, his songs of life, and love and death.

The last, the keris, or traditional curved dagger, is the sign of eternal vigilance for 'without the keris, the others will vanish.'

The last volume, House of Glass, hands us over to the policeman and spy, Pangamanann, philosopher of despair and unreliable narrator of the slippery sort. This is perhaps the most profound book of the entire quartet, it is certainly the wisest. Things come full circle in a magnificent panoply reminiscent of Pram's beloved wayang. The Javanese knight has embraced all things, hated all things, forgiven all things - the wisdom and foolishness of west and of east alike are somehow reconciled in a moment of transcendent grace and luminous grandeur. Special mention is due to the translator, Max Lane, one time second secretary in the Australian embassy in Jakarta, recalled in 1981 because of his work on the Buru Quartet. His has been a labour of love, and it shows.

A full length performance of the wayang kulit:

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Pictures: Cover illustration from This Earth of Mankind by Stephan Daigle; photo of sculptures at Borobudur by Grace Andreacchi; photo of Pramoedya Ananta Toer circa 1960; Pitta elegans photographed by James Eaton

Grace Andreacchihttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8876206268057902489.post-9340274180534609872012-07-03T17:07:00.001+01:002014-09-24T21:53:35.506+01:00SHADES OF GREY

It was in a universe far, far away that I wrote my first novel, Give My Heart Ease. [PDF here] It tells the story of the doomed love affair between a fragile, wounded man with a taste for rough sex and a beautiful, naive young woman who tries to understand and heal him, and is nearly destroyed in the attempt. It has some pretty hot sex:

Our need for each other is fierce, immediate, brooking no interference from time or circumstance, with very little tenderness. The leather sofa is cold under my naked ass, and we are slipping all over the place, until we slither to the ground. We go on and on like this, for how long? I can't tell, ten, twenty minutes, half an hour? I feel delirious, I feel hot, I feel cold, I can't feel anything anymore, and still he's pounding the floor with me. When he comes he lets out a deep scream, like a man dying, like a drowning man going down for the last time, a sad, sustained wail and I think: it is the loneliest sound I've ever heard.

*

That's on page 17. Best-selling 'erotic novel' Fifty Shades of Grey makes you wait till Chapter 8! And while the above is not something I'm particularly proud of, at least it does not describe sex  'like the spin cycle on a washing machine, wow.'

Like Fifty Shades of Grey, Give My Heart Ease also includes the occasional wardrobe detail, although admittedly not to the same meticulous degree of attention: 'I'm beginning to wish I'd borrowed one of Kate's formal blazers rather than worn my navy-blue jacket. I have made an effort and worn my one and only skirt, my sensible brown knee-length boots, and a blue sweater.' - Fifty Shades of Grey, Chapter One

Here my ill-starred lovers a few hours later on the same day as above, and they've hit the road:

'Get out,' he said. I got out. We were in a field, there were no buildings in sight, just a few trees far away on the horizon. Swathes of white mist lay across the fields. I could see him clearly now, the moon was bright and high overhead. He pushed me up against the car,without saying a word, pulled up my skirt and dragged down my panties. I was only wearing a light sundress and sandals. Grabbing me around the waist, he flung me onto the ground, and himself on top. I hit my head on the ground, and rough dirt and plant stubble scratched my face and the backs of my arms and legs. He fumbled with his pants, got them open, shoved inside me. I lay very still, it was over quickly .He sat up, lit another cigarette. Suddenly I screamed and leapt away. He was holding the burning cigarette against my breast.

*

Just one more reason to be grateful we've all given up smoking.

Give My Heart Ease was published by the reasonably well-established Permanent Press and indeed is still available. It won a prize, the New American Writing Award (all first novels ought to win prizes, as this makes the author feel that somebody somewhere, has noticed her) and was duly translated into Slovenian. To this day I cherish a fantasy that the good people of Slovenia, while few in number (population 2,050,189) are highly superior in taste and cultivation to such an extent that, were I to disembark one day at Lake Bled, I would no doubt find myself overwhelmed by hordes of autograph hungry fans waving their prized copies of Pomiri Mi Srce.

Lake Bled, Slovenia

Be that as it may, the recent runaway success of Fifty Shades of Grey has led me to wonder - where did it all go wrong for me? For there are some striking parallels between this piece of egregious fan fiction and my own youthful offering. Admittedly her s&m hero is a gorgeous billionaire businessman and mine is a small-boned, bespectacled professor of philosophy who likes to spout Nietzsche and Goethe when things start to go wrong. And admittedly I was channeling Wuthering Heights (and surely Heathcliff is the great original for the wounded male who kills the thing he loves) and not irony-free teenaged vampire stuff. I've long since left the writing of bourgeois fiction behind me, still the debates around the book have reminded me just how uncomfortable we can be with the dark side of sex. Give My Heart Ease was praised by some critics as 'graphic but surprisingly moving' and 'thought-provoking literature', but most seemed to find it disturbing and even sick or evil. Has this particular rough beast's hour come round at last?

Author did NOT approve this cover!

Sex is a crazy thing. There's no such thing as moral sex, white and shining. Not in this world, anyhow, and as to what might or might not conspire between heavenly bodies, we shall refrain from speculation. We have it on the very best authority 'they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven' and we'll just have to leave it at that. Meanwhile, here on Planet Earth, sex is neither white nor black, but a multiplicity of shades between light and darkness. Love can be terrifying, and the body can betray as well as comfort. Even the silliest book must be saying something if so many people want to argue with it.

Not all of Give My Heart Ease was youthful folly. I leave you with a passage that I'm not at all ashamed to have written, older and wiser though I may be. In this scene the heroine, Justine, is describing Ely Cathedral:

Inside it is startlingly cold, empty, silent. From where I stand at the entrance, the nave stretches away into infinite space. The triple-tiered columns march in even rows, the tall, white window-walls of glass shifting in between. I step forward ,looking up. A rushing, as of wind in a tunnel, a sound that is not quite a sound, of wings beating against that wind. I let my arms float up, borne on the still regions of space. As I walk, looking up, my feet are suspended above the ground, yet I hear my footsteps echo on the stones. The whiteness of the columns, all rising, the deep hues of the ceiling, the bright glass, all draw me into their soundless dance. All swoop and dodge around me, faster and faster, until I'm reeling, falling. I reach out to stop myself. I grasp at nothing, and I stagger, and fall on my knees. I look up. I am under the lantern. Right into the heart of an age, of a mystery, of a timeless truth, I look up. It glows and glows and covers me in light. I lie on my back on the stones, cold for a thousand years. I lie there and I look up. I reach out to touch it; I think I might float up and touch it. There are tears on my face. "How beautiful you are," I whisper.

The Lantern, Ely Cathedral

Give my Heart Ease is now available as a free PDF.

Pictures: Untitled nude by Félix Vallottton, Book Cover photo by Grace Andreacchi, Lake Bled in Slovenia, the lantern at Ely Cathedral.Grace Andreacchihttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8876206268057902489.post-63865126616260498542011-12-02T15:13:00.001Z2011-12-05T17:06:25.369ZPip's Country

Sunday dawned bright and cold, just the sort of day I'd been wanting to visit Pips's country. For the Kentish marshes in winter are a country none too gay, if Dickens be taken at his word. The memorable passage that opens my favourite among all the novels of the inimitable Mr. D, describes it thus:<o:p></o:p>

Ours was the marsh country, down by the river, within, as the river wound, twenty miles of the sea. My first most vivid and broad impression of the identity of things, seems to me to have been gained on a memorable raw afternoon towards evening. At such a time I found out for certain, that this bleak place overgrown with nettles was the churchyard; and that Philip Pirrip, late of this parish, and also Georgiana wife of the above, were dead and buried; and that Alexander, Bartholomew, Abraham, Tobias, and Roger, infant children of the aforesaid, were also dead and buried; and that the dark flat wilderness beyond the churchyard, intersected with dykes and mounds and gates, with scattered cattle feeding on it, was the marshes; and that the low leaden line beyond, was the river; and that the distant savage lair from which the wind was rushing, was the sea; and that the small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry, was Pip.<o:p></o:p>

 - Great Expectations, Chapter 1<o:p></o:p>

Was Pip! And it is in search of Pip that we set out that day, more particularly of the tiny hamlet of Cooling, where Charles Dickens in his indefatigable rambles once pitched up, only to find himself in contemplation of no fewer than thirteen infant graves grouped around their parents' melancholy monument. Thus the seed was planted for Pip's vanished brothers – the wise author, well aware that fact always trumps fiction and must be allowed that privilege, reduced the number of dead siblings to five – and what more delicious evocation of childhood's confusions than this:<o:p></o:p>

As I never saw my father or my mother, and never saw any likeness of either of them (for their days were long before the days of photographs), my first fancies regarding what they were like, were unreasonably derived from their tombstones. The shape of the letters on my father's, gave me an odd idea that he was a square, stout, dark man, with curly black hair. From the character and turn of the inscription, "Also Georgiana Wife of the Above," I drew a childish conclusion that my mother was freckled and sickly. To five little stone lozenges, each about a foot and a half long, which were arranged in a neat row beside their grave, and were sacred to the memory of five little brothers of mine - who gave up trying to get a living, exceedingly early in that universal struggle - I am indebted for a belief I religiously entertained that they had all been born on their backs with their hands in their trousers-pockets, and had never taken them out in this state of existence.<o:p></o:p>

 - ibid.<o:p></o:p>

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The little stone lozenges are still there, much as Dickens describes them and as to trousers-pockets, I can testify that such an action recommends itself in that blistering sea wind. The little church of St. James, where one easily imagines the infant Pip wedged miserably between gentle Joe Gargery and the perpetually furious Mrs. Joe ('On the Rampage, Pip, and off the Rampage, Pip – such is Life!') (And for all those who share my enthusiasm for wayward punctuation – how about the force of Joe's capitals! We would never hear him half so well without 'em.) <o:p></o:p>

Why Great Expectations? It's not as funny as, say, Pickwick, for its humour is so often tinged with cruelty. Think of the Christmas dinner, where Pip is tormented by his elders, while Joe attempts to console him with ever another spoonful of gravy.

<o:p></o:p>

Mrs. Hubble shook her head, and contemplating me with a mournful presentiment that I should come to no good, asked, "Why is it that the young are never grateful?" This moral mystery seemed too much for the company until Mr. Hubble tersely solved it by saying, "Naterally wicious." Everybody then murmured "True!" and looked at me in a particularly unpleasant and personal manner.<o:p></o:p>

Joe's station and influence were something feebler (if possible) when there was company than when there was none. But he always aided and comforted me when he could, in some way of his own, and he always did so at dinner-time by giving me gravy, if there were any. There being plenty of gravy to-day, Joe spooned into my plate, at this point, about half a pint.<o:p></o:p>

 -op.cit., Chapter 4

We miss in this book the feeble-minded dickensian heroines with their winning smiles and heads of bright curls who have their original in the idealised mother to that greatest of all imaginary autobiographers, David Copperfield. Into her place steps Estella, who is never winning, but always proud, cold and distant, a belle dame sans merci whose heart is as bleak and desolate as those Kentish marshes – and she's only a child! A genuine child, for she cannot be more than ten or eleven years old when first we make her acquaintance. Yet she has none of the childish graces that Dickens gave to his many youthful objects of desire, first among them David Copperfield's Dora, who is nota child but persists in behaving like one to a degree that, to my taste, is at least as irritating as it is adorable. Dickens had a faible for silly girls, we can guess that much, and a while back when the world and he were young, a young Miss by the name of Maria Beadnell turned him down. (It seems her father believed the young Charles would never amount to much…) He carried the torch for her, and don't it burn that bright in the eyes of Dora and Clara and little Nell - but Estella's eyes burn with an altogether different sort of fire. Indeed, Estella's eyes are to prove identical to those of a murderess.<o:p></o:p>

'But her hands were Estella's hands, and her eyes were Estella's eyes, and if she had reappeared a hundred times I could have been neither more sure nor less sure that my conviction was the truth.' <o:p></o:p>

 - op. cit., Chapter 48

By the time Dickens came to write Great Expectations he had made a train wreck of his life. He had left his wife of many years and his numerous children to pursue a very young actress with whom he had become utterly infatuated. She barely tolerated him. Be careful what you ask for, they say... When the child-wife appears again, in the brooding pages of his unfinished masterpiece, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, she is now inexplicably unable to command the love of her affianced cousin, despite - or should that be on account of? her girlish charms. What's more, her exaggerated innocence now excites the villainous anti-hero, Mr. Jaspers, to sadistic excesses of violence and lust.
<o:p></o:p>

Great Expectationsgives us the darkness. It is Dickens writing as if he'd been interrogated by Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor, and found the answers wanting. There's a story that the two writers met once, briefly - an unimaginable encounter, is it not? What might they have said to one another, the English upstart genius and the Russian voluptuary monk? Whether this meeting ever took place in the 'real world' is a matter for dispute among scholars of such things, but the darkness at the heart of the book is what interests us. Look at Miss Havisham! <o:p></o:p>

<o:p>
</o:p>

<o:p>
</o:p>

<o:p>
</o:p>

'I saw that everything within my view which ought to be white, had been white long ago, and had lost its lustre, and was faded and yellow. I saw that the bride within the bridal dress had withered like the dress, and like the flowers, and had no brightness left but the brightness of her sunken eyes. I saw that the dress had been put upon the rounded figure of a young woman, and that the figure upon which it now hung loose, had shrunk to skin and bone. Once, I had been taken to see some ghastly waxwork at the Fair, representing I know not what impossible personage lying in state. Once, I had been taken to one of our old marsh churches to see a skeleton in the ashes of a rich dress, that had been dug out of a vault under the church pavement. Now, waxwork and skeleton seemed to have dark eyes that moved and looked at me. I should have cried out, if I could.'<o:p></o:p>

 - op. cit., Chapter 8

Hats off, ladies and gentlemen. A round of applause if you please.<o:p></o:p>

The book begins, as we have noted, in a churchyard, where Pip stands shivering amongst the graves of his dead family. This sets the scene for what may well be the most terrifying opening in all of literature: his encounter with the escaped convict.<o:p></o:p>

"Hold your noise!" cried a terrible voice, as a man started up from among the graves at the side of the church porch. "Keep still, you little devil, or I'll cut your throat!"<o:p></o:p>

A fearful man, all in coarse grey, with a great iron on his leg. A man with no hat, and with broken shoes, and with an old rag tied round his head. A man who had been soaked in water, and smothered in mud, and lamed by stones, and cut by flints, and stung by nettles, and torn by briars; who limped, and shivered, and glared and growled; and whose teeth chattered in his head as he seized me by the chin.<o:p></o:p>

"O! Don't cut my throat, sir," I pleaded in terror. "Pray don't do it, sir."<o:p></o:p>

 - op. cit, Chapter 1

The Reader's heart, too, is in his throat I think.<o:p></o:p>

Pips's childhood world is a violent one – his sister, Mrs. Joe, assaults him on a daily basis with a large stick known as 'Tickler', and what looks like an escape, through his 'great expectations', will turn out to be a deceitful trap. And he's at least as much sinning as sinned against, this Pip. From those who humiliate, trick and torment him he learns snobbery, deceit and cunning. Redemption, when it comes, if it comes, will not be easy for this boy, this man Pip. No diva-ex-machina with a head of quivering curls will descend on a cloud of love and glory to rescue him from himself. 'Tis an honest book, a truthful book, a book almost entirely devoid of that appealing, and appalling! dickensian cant that we all fall for, and fall for gratefully, greedily, so great is the art with which that cant is delivered by the likes of Little Nell and Tiny Tim.

Scrooge sees the error of his ways before it's too late – just! Pip's revelation comes a good deal later than that, and I, for one, shall always love him for it. The great rhyming plot unwinds itself like the great river creeping across the marshes, and whirls us at last into its vortex along with Magwitch, the convict, and Compeyson, and Pip himself, who nearly, but not quite, drowns. We come up gasping for air, wondering if anything of value remains in this world at all. No answer is given but sorrow.<o:p></o:p>

<o:p>
</o:p>

St. James' Church, Cooling and the marsh country

<o:p>
</o:p>

<o:p>
</o:p>

<o:p>Pictures: The-Blacksmith's-Shop, </o:p>François Bonvin; Pip's Country photographed by Grace Andreacchi; Miss Havisham, by Harry Furness; Tiny Tim, by M.F. Taylor.

Grace Andreacchihttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8876206268057902489.post-27241568464571418712011-07-22T00:59:00.006+01:002011-07-22T13:31:30.578+01:00Prophet and Loss

A PROPHET INDEED
Julian Grant's 'Prophet and Loss' astonishes with music of unearthly beauty

reviewed by Grace Andreacchi

We break with tradition to bring you this report from the operatic front line.

On Wednesday I had the far too rare privilege of attending the premiere of a brand new opera by composer Julian Grant. 'Prophet and Loss' was commissioned by the Oundle International Festival, and is written to an original libretto by Grant himself. Being already well acquainted with this composer's very impressive oeuvres, I set out for the picturesque little town in Northhamptonshire with high hopes and great expectations. To say these were surpassed would be to understate the case fundamentally. Like a tsunami, 'Prophet and Loss' swept aside everything I had ever heard before. This was music as elemental, as necessary, as great as anything I have ever heard in an opera house.

The plot centres round the character of Nessa Husk, only child and heir of an immensely powerful but ailing tycoon. She loves and fears him, and fails to love her own children, caught up as she is in the constant demands of the Husk Oil Company. An encounter with a waiter (he spills the coffee, then demands her phone number) leads to a series of ever more mysterious messages, accompanied by ethereal music:

'To know you is to trust you
To trust you is to hold you
Do you need to be held?'

Nessa's unhappiness and her quest for freedom from a life where she 'cannot breathe' take us to some very unexpected places, not least a village in the Himalayas. The story offers an answer of sorts, and one that will take your breath away.

During a fascinating talk before the performance, Julian Grant spoke of not being afraid to be 'obvious', to go for the big dramatic musical moment – how interesting that when these moments come, while they may be 'obvious' as effects, as music they are of supreme subtlety and delicacy. The opera is also deliciously funny, as the spirit world and the everyday, the real and the surreal are interwoven as playfully, as lightly as that light the characters are seeking.

'How did you find us?'

'My mobile phone started singing to me…'

Major roles were cast with professional soloists of very high calibre, all of whom gave fully committed performances. Victoria Simmonds, at the heart of the piece as Nessa, gave a full-voiced, emotionally nuanced performance. Edwin Hawkes, as her father, was alternately intimidating and pathetic, and sang with a rich, even tone. Derek Lee Ragin, as the mysterious waiter Naya'il, had both the sweetness of tone and the presence to convince in this unusual role of spiritual mystery man. Particularly moving were the talented young singers Tristan Stocks and Adrian Ward in the roles of the fractured and dysfunctional teenaged sons, while Alison Charlton-West as the 'proxy-mum' brought a very convincing warmth to the proceedings.

The community aspect of this opera brought much delight, as we were treated to a rousing chorus of very small statured shareholders (children of Polebrook and Glapthorn Primary Schools), while the adult chorus brought at least as much verve to their many roles. The orchestra under Alexander Walker negotiated this refined and exciting music with remarkable clarity. The team of director Alistair Boag and designer Rebecca Desmond demonstrated with great ingenuity and skill just how much theatrical magic can be conjured up with two parts paper and string to three parts faith. That the reach of the Oundle Festival sometimes exceeds its grasp can only be commended as a high intention. Credit all round, and I in no way wish to detract from their achievements when I ask – why isn't this major work to be seen in one of our major opera houses?

Thanks to the Oundle Festival for acting as midwife to this beautiful, magical child. Now somebody please make me Queen of Bavaria so I can build a proper opera house for the further performance of this marvellous opera.

One more performance on Friday 22 July at 7h30. Tickets are available from the Oundle Festival Ticket Hotline 01832 274734
The green and pleasant village of Oundle is only two hours by train or car from London. If you care about opera, go there.

Grace Andreacchihttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8876206268057902489.post-65844020079761989462011-04-21T19:00:00.003+01:002011-04-21T19:33:26.067+01:00A Little Bit Sacred

I don't think I ever seriously considered any other path in life than that of the writer. From as early as I can remember I was fascinated by words, their seemingly magical ability to create an alternate reality. Is there something in me that prefers my own reality to that of the so-called 'real world'? I know there is.

My approach to poetry is not fundamentally different from my approach to prose – both are for me exercises in self-discipline. I'd say the difference lies in the absolutely concise nature of poetry. It is, if you like, prose distilled, words reduced to the happy few. I think there is more 'room' in prose, both literally in the sense of more words on more pages, and figuratively in the sense that a story or a novel has space within it for the ego to expand, the self to demonstrate, expostulate, even show off. I don't think that works in poetry. When I write a poem I try to leave my self out of it. This has become more and more true for me over many years of struggling to write good poems. I feel the poet must be present as eyes, as ears, as heart, but absent as ego. I don't like poems that tell me too much about the poet's inner state. I don't even like poems that tell me too much about anything. I think the whole art of poetry lies in telling just those few things, it may be even that one thing, that count.

I've learned much from a lifetime of reading many great poets, but this 'less is more' philosophy is something I learned most of all from the classical Japanese school. At its best Japanese poetry, which, I hasten to add, I only read in translation! achieves this quality of egolessness, of lightness in the sense of not being weighed down by the gravitas of the poet's perpetual self-consciousness. Basho's frog is just a frog, his chrysanthemum is just a chrysanthemum – it's not a poet looking at a frog and remembering all the frogs of his unhappy childhood, nor all the chrysanthemums he sent to his disappointing lover. It's something to aim at, that kind of purity.

Another important influence for me is classical music, especially the opera. I was practically raised at the 'Met' in New York, where my little brother worked for several years as a child singer. At an impossibly early age I was already in love with the melodrama and passion and above all the sensual beauty of opera. Although I'm not a musician, I approach words with a musician's ear. Be it prose or poetry, it is not right until it 'sounds' right, and I will worry a sentence or a line until the rhythm and weight are as perfect as I can make them. English prosody poses particular problems, for our language does not lend itself easily to poetic forms. It is perhaps this very awkwardness that has raised it to the first rank, as English language poets have never been able to fall into the kind of easy answers that plague, for example, several centuries of French verse. I cut my teeth on such Old Masters as Milton, Spenser, and the high Victorians – you really can't beat Tennyson for a good old-fashioned piece of high-class prosody. This was my meat and drink as a child. Not that I think anyone should attempt to write in that style today- God forbid. But I learned to listen very hard to the sounds of words and the sounds of lines and the whole great ringing music of poetic language from these poets.

Finally I would like to say that the greatest quality of all for a poet is something I'd like to call purity of heart. This is not to be mistaken for mere sincerity – 'All bad poetry is sincere', an observation first made by Oscar Wilde, and seconded by every poor soul who's ever read a stack of poetry submissions. But that is not as much as to say that good poetry is to be insincere. The whole trick of it is to write with that same sincerity that informs the gauche and miserable doggerel of the sincerely untalented, but to do it as beautifully, as gracefully, as magnificently as a bird singing, a wave crashing or a dog biting. I really don't have time for 'academic' poetry, poetry that is just showing off – 'Look how clever I am!' Such things are tedious beyond belief. Every time I sit down and try to write a poem, and I use the word 'try' advisedly, I feel I am doing something a little bit sacred.

A new poem for Easter, TO CHRIST, THE BRIDEGROOM
This piece first appeared as part of the 'Poet-Speak' series for Magnapoets Magazine.
Photo: Lotus Flower by wasoxygen on flckr.comGrace Andreacchihttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8876206268057902489.post-82443352637842122612011-01-30T00:00:00.010Z2011-03-17T19:19:50.473ZHadewijch of Brabant and The High Palace of Love

I was in the small Flemish town of Bruges, it was an afternoon in early December, and the snow was falling fast. Falling on the peaked rooftops and frozen canals, on the narrow streets and bare, solemn trees. At the edge of town I crossed a bridge over an icy waterway, guarded by flocks of swans, oblivious, magnificent. On the other side of the bridge in a field of snow I found the modest low buildings of the Beguinage. There were once thousands of these beguinages all over Flanders, and in France and Germany as well, though they persisted longest in the low countries, perhaps the very lowness of the landscape rendering them less visible to the eyes of disapproving authority. A beguinage was something like a nunnery, and yet it was not quite a nunnery, for the ladies there were free to come and then to go at their own good pleasure. They lived each in her own small house, and kept company with one another in prayer in their own small church. They wore a modest dress of black and white, and they earned their own modest means through their own modest labours. What they did most immodestly was to love God, and some of them have testified to this great love in words.

'For nothing in life contents them – neither their gifts, nor their service, nor consolations, nor all they can do. For inwardly Love draws them so strongly to her, and they feel Love so vast and so incomprehensible, and they feel themselves so small and so inadequate, unable to satisfy Love.'

- Hadewijch, from the Letters

It was in just such a place as this that the 13th century poet and gentle lady Hadewijch lived her life of service to Love, nobody's sure precisely where, for she vanished with barely a trace into the dark well of history. But it was certainly a place like this one, a Flemish beguinage, and her eyes must have seen many a winter day such as this one, when the silence of holiness is rendered even deeper and lovelier by the white silence of snow. A high palace of love! For not in marble palaces, but in such humble places as these the humble heart dwells in high service to Love. The following poem is from her Strofische Gedichten[original text]:

OF GREAT LOVE IN HIGH THOUGHTS [No. 31]

I.

Of great Love in high thoughts
I long to think, day and night.
She with her terrible might
so opens my heart
I must surrender all to her.
In the high birth of her battles
I sought my true delight
So she took me and threw me into her prison.

II.

I thought I might suffer there without harm
thought myself safe in her embrace
that she would lead me well
down those narrow paths of hers.
But when I sought to rest in her grace
she only assailed me with fresh commands.
This is a wonderful report!
The greater the love, the greater the suffering.

III.

This is a great wonder, beyond understanding
Love's giving and her taking.
When she gives comfort
the tender fruits tremble on the vine.
I bid and beg of Love
that she open noble hearts
and teach them to sing her song:
the low notes of fear and the heights of hope.

IV.

Comfort and cruelty in one person
that's the true taste of love.
Were wise Solomon still living
He could not unravel such a high thing.
No sermon can explain it
The song surpasses all notes.
The time I spent going after fishes
Hid in itself its own reward.

V.

Hook and sea, both are long
But not the time, for those who love
thus shun worldly company.
It's a song of losses and great gains.
Pride counsels me to hold fast
to hold so tightly, I shall capture
a Being beyond all bliss.
This music surpasses all songs.

VI.

The music that surpasses all songs -
I mean: Love in her might.
I say but a little, and yet not enough
for strange hearts, ever cold,
have suffered little for Love's sake.
They don't know how Love betrays
her riches only to high and noble hearts
nourishing them at her breast.

VII.

The might of Love is great
above our understanding
whether near or far the same
a peace that destroys all peace
this peace that dwells in love.
Those who make up their minds to follow her
shall find comfort on her breast
beloved in Love's own lovely love.

VIII.

He who wishes to follow Love's way
Must regard neither cost nor shame
Nor pain, he must stand to everything
Even her most terrible commands
And render perfect service in every manner
alike in her coming and in her going.
Those who serve Love in faith and truth
Shall be made perfect lovers at last.

- Hadewijch of Brabant, 13th C

translated from the Dutch by Grace Andreacchi

MORE HADEWIJCH

Photo: the Beguinage in Bruges, by Grace AndreacchiGrace Andreacchihttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8876206268057902489.post-63170219971532579232011-01-04T16:35:00.005Z2011-01-04T19:12:00.667ZSimple Things - the Poet Eva Strittmatter

'I write of the simple things

Birth, death, and the time in between...'

The poet Eva Strittmatter [1930 - 2011] is dead. Her gentle voice, that won her a place as the most read poet in modern Germany, now falls silent. Although she is nearly unknown in the English-speaking world, her poems of 'simple things' are universal in their appeal. She writes of her garden and of the forest, of children who grow up and away, of lovers who enchant and betray. She writes with a melancholy typical of that generation that came of age in the blasted ruin that was postwar Germany, and with an emotional clarity and sense of mystery I find typically feminine, in the best and strongest sense of the word.

MOON-SNOW

Moon-snow lies on the meadows

as from you I go.

We've loved one another long now

not just since the last snow.

Yet every time, I come to you,

it's so:

I don't know, who I am, or where,

I'm sad and I'm madly happy.

(Part heathen and part saint.)

- Eva Strittmatter, Moon-snow Lies on the Meadows

She lived to be eighty years old, she endured a long and stormy marriage to the writer Erwin Strittmatter, she raised four sons and wrote fourteen books of poetry, as well as several in prose and a few titles for children. Although recognised as a writer by the powers that once were in the DDR, her work in no way betrays her, for you will find nothing in it of that cretinous positivism that passed for 'thinking' in the looking-glass east. She is always true, both to the reader and to herself. Let men argue about politics, the 'simple things' are enough for her.

LOVE

How terrible was the flame

In which together we once burned

In the end an ember remains

And the usual happens, even to us.

That's not ash, that last trace of fire

Shows our daily work. And how precious

this tiny bit of warmth, I learned

in this worst year

of all my years.

Should another winter like this come

and another such snow fall upon me

Only this warmth can save me

from death. What else

should hold me? What remains of our Love:

We had each other. No grass

will grow over us, no stone

so long as this ember glows.

So long as there's an ember

there might be fire…

 - Eva Strittmatter

Translations from the German are by Grace Andreacchi

Photos: Eva Strittmatter, photographed in front of a mirror by Erwin Strittmatter, 1965, Neues Deutschland; 'Hot Embers' orchids, western Australia

Grace Andreacchihttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8876206268057902489.post-24642784079267934022010-05-31T19:35:00.001+01:002010-05-31T23:40:22.503+01:00la Madonna di Maggio

It was on an evening in May, Mary's month, that I stumbled across the little church of San Giovanni Battista, high on a rocky hillside overlooking the Bay of Amalfi. A strange, rather frightening lament echoed inside the empty vault - was somebody crying? Gradually I realised it was the voice of a dove, nesting somewhere in the clefts of the ancient stonework.

'O my dove, that art in the clefts of the rock, in the secret places of the stairs,

let me see thy countenance, let me hear thy voice;

for sweet is thy voice, and thy countenance is comely.'

 - Song of Solomon 2, 14

Twilight was falling fast, and I could just make out the delicate swirled patterns of the 18th century majolica tiles beneath my feet. I was looking for the Madonna, and I did not have to look far. As is nearly always the case in the south of Italy, hers is the place of honour directly over the altar. She looked down at me from that holy spot, where she waits patiently for all the banished children of Eve who care to visit her. She holds her baby close up to her face, and her eyes are turned towards us to receive our prayers for, like any good mother, she is always listening. I said what I had to say, then turned to leave and found there, on a small table beside the door, the following prayer of astonishing beauty. I don't know who wrote it, but it bears the inscription: In ricordo del restauro della Statua della Madonna di Maggio, a devozione dei fedeli e del parroco don Pio Bozza, Maggio 2010.

Here it is, in both English and the original Italian:

PRAYER TO OUR LADY OF THE MAY

You are entirely beautiful, O Mary.
Beautiful is your head upon you like Carmel.
Your most pure eyes are signs giving faith and hope wherever you turn your gaze.

Beautiful are your merciful ears,
that listen to our cries.
Beautiful your mouth, your tongue and your lips for, like Jesus, you have words of eternal life.

Beautiful your hands, filled with favours and graces to give to us. Beautiful your feet that crush the head of the serpent. Holy your pure breast, for there is the throne and temple of our Saviour.

Precious your most pure blood, from which the Son of God was formed, and made Man. Sweet your heart, O Mary, a sanctuary of the Holy Spirit, your soul, the most perfect picture of God. You are beautiful in conception, beautiful in life, beautiful in death. Truly, you are beautiful, O Mary.

God has given you the beauty of the moon and the splendour of the sun, the loveliness of the rose, the candour of the lily and the purity of the dove.
You are the star of the sea, you are the gate of heaven.
All the universe sings of your beauty, you are praised by the Lord God himself, who sings that you are entirely beautiful.

O Mary, O Mary, in my so great misery I too dare to salute you, Virgin and Mother of God, adorned with spotless beauty.

And Thou, O Mary, through your intercession, make my heart ever spotless, and at the final hour of my life let my soul expire in your arms.
Amen. Thus I hope and thus may it be!

PREGHIERA ALLA MADONNA DI MAGGIO

Tutta bella sei, o Maria.
Bello è il tuo capo, sublime come il Carmelo.
Gli occhi tuoi purissimi sono i segni che danna fiducia e speranza in chi li rivolgi.

Belle le pietose tue orrecchie,
che ascoltano i nostri pianti.
Bella la tua bocca, la tua lingua, le tua labbra, perché, come Gesù, hai parole di vita eterna.

Belle le tue mani. colme di favori e di grazia per dispensarle a noi. Belli i tuoi piedi che schiacciano il capo del serpente. Venerando è il casto tuo seno, perché trono e tempio del nostro Salvatore.

Prezioso è il tuo purissimo sangue, da cui si formò il Figlio di Dio, fatto Uomo. Dolce è il tuo cuore, o Maria, sacrario dello Spirito Santo, e l'anima tua, è il ritratto più espressivo di Dio. Bella tu sei, nella concezione, bella nella vita, bella nella morta. Veramente sei bella, o Maria.

Dio ha ta dato la bellezza della luna e lo splendore del sole, la soavità della rosa, il candore del giglio e la purezza della columba.
Tu sei la stella del mare, tu sei la porta del cielo.
Tutto l'universo canto la tua bellezza, sei lodata dallo stesso Iddio, che tutta bella ti canta.

O Maria, o Maria, in tanta mia miseria ardisco anch'io salutarti Vergine e Madre di Dio, adorna di bellezza immacolata.

E tu, o Maria, con la tua intercessione, fa che sia sempre immocolato il cuore mio, e che nell'ora estrema della mia vita spiri fra la tua braccia l'anima mia.
Amen. Cosi spero e cosi sia!

trans. Grace Andreacchi & Daniel Hadas

Picture: Madonna della Roccie, Filippo Lippi, 1406 - 14697Grace Andreacchihttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8876206268057902489.post-56530275197914541942010-05-07T16:15:00.003+01:002010-05-07T16:20:40.152+01:00Semimaru - A Metaphysical Tragedy

There is not another play in the whole of Noh quite like Semimaru. A highly stylised form of drama that has its origins in 14th century Japan, Noh is a sophisticated affair, something upon which the aspirational samurai class of the day might test their poetical appetites. Zeami, the author of more than fifty plays, is the foremost practitioner, and he brought the art to its pinnacle. The plays typically deal with a problem of karmic or cosmic disorder, only to see it resolved through the intervention of a virtuous spirit. Semimaru is different. Although it outwardly appears to follow the typical set-up for Noh, in fact nothing in this play is what it seems.

What we have here is a pure metaphyscial tragedy, a 'theatre of the mind' that takes place outside space and time. The starting point is a legend - or rather several legends which, as so often in Japan, have become tangled like vines. A blind Prince has been banished to a mountain - this is Semimaru, master of the biwa (Japanese lute), poet and possible guardian of the famous pass at Osaka barrier. The dramatic highpoint of the play is a visit from his beloved sister, Sakagami, who is mad, whose name means both 'upside down hair' and 'spirit of the mountain'. Her brisltling hair is the outward sign of her inward turmoil:

Though born a princess, some deed of evil
From my unknown past in former lives
Causes my mind at times to act deranged.
And in my madness I wander distant ways.
My blueblack hair grows skywards;
Though I stroke it, it will not lie flat.

As one reads on, one becomes ever more aware of the deep strangeness of this play. It is not the Princess, but the world that is upside down:

My hair, rising upward from my body,
Turns white with the touch of stars and frost:
The natural order or upside down?
How amazing that both should be within me!

When she hears the refined notes of the lute she is startled out of her madness, and recognises her brother. Weeping, they fall into one another's arms. For a brief moment time stands still, and brother and sister are reunited, isolated in their love as in some chambre séparée métaphysique, 'twin blossoms on a single bough'. It is this state of togetherness-apart that defines the tragedy. The reunion is only momentary, Sakagami must wander the mountain paths forever, while Semimaru is left alone in his little straw hut to sing his songs of everlasting sorrow.

Hear him call on the Osaka road,

a frightened bird, as darkness falls,

yearning still for her long, black hair.

The last quotation is from the translation by Royall Tyler. All others from the Donald Keene translation.

SONNET FOR SEMIMARU is my own tribute to Brother and Sister.

Pictures: Noh mask for Prince Semimaru; Semimaru, Ando Hiroshige (1797 - 1858)
Grace Andreacchihttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8876206268057902489.post-18644973703872576592010-04-15T12:45:00.001+01:002010-04-15T12:49:46.649+01:00The Gifts of the Fairies

 Presently the fairies began to bestow their gifts upon the princess. The youngest ordained that she should be the most beautiful person in the world; the next, that she should have the temper of an angel; the third, that she should do everything with wonderful grace; the fourth, that she should dance to perfection; the fifth, that she should sing like a nightingale; and the sixth, that she should play every kind of music with the utmost skill.
 - Charles Perrault, The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood

An interesting list! This Princess will be well equipped for a theatrical career, should the royalty thing fall through. Everybody knows what happens next, how the bad fairy curses the Princess, and the curse is turned aside by the last fairy, from death to a deep sleep. Like Brünhilde, the Princess must sleep until a Prince arrives who has the power to wake her, 'un chevalier sans peur et sans reproche'. The tale, with its deep overtones in the unconscious, exists in many versions the world over. But I'm interested in that little list...

Is it really enough to sing and dance to perfection, to be good-tempered and beautiful? These admirable accomplishemnts will be of scant use were one to find oneself (let us suppose) washed up on a desert isalnd. As we all do from time to time! What gifts then ought one to covet for one's infant princess? I recall a film in which a very old lady who had suffered very much at the hands of the Nazis was asked - How did you manage to keep your spirit and your heart and even your sense of humour? And she answered: Consider the alternative.

Faith and hope, fortitude and perseverance - hard! So hard. If they weren't hard, why - they wouldn't be virtues at all. For some reason it's hard for us to be good. Were it not so, this sorry world would be a Garden of Eden. Patience too is a virtue. Which reminds me of the Contessa (an old Venetian acquaintance), whose English nanny taught her this:

Patience is a virtue,
Possess it if you can.
It's seldom found in woman
And never found in man.

Back in the USSR! Good and bad fairies fight it out:

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Picture: Marie Petipa as the Lilac Fairy and Lyubov Vishnevskaya as an Attendant, 1890
Grace Andreacchihttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8876206268057902489.post-50895750710813426722010-04-01T23:37:00.008+01:002010-04-09T13:01:01.590+01:00Easter Tidings - The Dream of the Rood

A man is dreaming of a tree. The tree is covered in gems that shine with an unearthly beauty, but slowly he begins to discern among those gems streams of blood. The tree is bleeding, bleeding from a wound in its side:

Wondrous that victory-beam--and I stained with sins,
with wounds of disgrace. I saw glory's tree
honored with trappings, shining with joys,
decked with gold; gems had
wrapped that forest tree worthily round.
Yet through that gold I clearly perceived
old strife of wretches , when first it began
to bleed on its right side. With sorrows most troubled,
I feared that fair sight. I saw that doom-beacon
turn trappings and hews: sometimes with water wet,
drenched with blood's going; sometimes with jewels decked.

[trans. Jonathan A. Glenn]

This is The Dream of the Rood, arguably the first poem to be written in English, though not in an English that is any longer readily accessible to us. The text comes down to us in a manuscript that dates from the 10th century, but portions of it can be seen engraved on a large stone cross dating from the about the end of the 7th century. The Ruthwell Cross is still standing, eighteen feet high in a quiet corner of rural Scotland, and bears some fragments of the poem in curious runes upon its stony sides. In this ancient poem the tree itself speaks to the dreamer, and tells him how he bore Christ, the King, like a hero on high:

Then saw I mankind's Lord
come with great courage when he would mount on me.
Then dared I not against the Lord's word
bend or break, when I saw earth's
fields shake. All fiends
I could have felled, but I stood fast.
The young hero stripped himself--he, God Almighty--
strong and stout-minded. He mounted high gallows,
bold before many, when he would loose mankind.
I shook when that Man clasped me. I dared, still, not bow to earth,
fall to earth's fields, but had to stand fast.
Rood was I reared. I lifted a mighty King,
Lord of the heavens, dared not to bend.

Dared not to bend! I wish all my dear Readers the perseverance and courage of the Holy Cross on this, the holiest of feasts.

Read my TALITHA, CUMI the story of a young life renewed.

Picture: Crucifix, Unknown Italian Master, 1190s
Grace Andreacchihttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8876206268057902489.post-41222441783055045712010-03-19T13:08:00.004Z2010-04-01T13:59:56.379+01:00Slightly Fishy - Mr. Leigh Hunt

'I cannot describe to you the despairing sensation of trying to do something for a man who seems incapable or unwilling to do anything further for himself, - at least to the purpose. It is like pulling a man out of a river who directly throws himself in again.' - Byron to John Murray 2 April, 1823

Among the less eminent Victorians we find the quasi-comical figure of Leigh Hunt, poet, essayist, radical publisher, inveterate flirt and impoverished bohemian to the fingertips - he seems to have been a good-hearted sort of man and good company, if you didn't mind his six unruly children destroying the household furnishings. He went to jail for calling the Prince Regent 'a fat Adonis of forty.' Ouch! While a lot of his poetry is not particularly distinguished, some of it continues to delight. He didn't only write 'Jenny Kissed Me', but also a set of remarkably odd sonnets about a fish, a man, and a kind of transmigration of fish soul into man. My own favourite is the fish sonnet, wherein the fish doth answer the man:

Amazing monster! that, for aught I know,
With the first sight of thee didst make our race
For ever stare! O flat and shocking face,
Grimly divided from the breast below!
Thou that on dry land horribly dost go
With a split body and most ridiculous pace,
Prong after prong, disgracer of all grace,
Long-useless-finned, haired, upright, unwet, slow!

O breather of unbreathable, sword-sharp air,
How canst exist? How bear thyself, thou dry
And dreary sloth? What particle canst share
Of the only blessed life, the watery?
I sometimes see of ye an actual pair
Go by! linked fin by fin! most odiously.

All three sonnets are HERE.

'Unwet' strikes me as particularly inspired, as does that idea of the 'flat and shocking face,Grimly divided from the breast below'.

Dickens had great fun with Hunt under the guise of 'Harold Skimpole' in Bleak House, and though he later denied he meant any harm, or indeed meant anything Hunt-ish, the damage was done. One has the impresion Hunt's character was simply too ridiculous to resist.

'When we went downstairs, we were presented to Mr. Skimpole, who was standing before the fire telling Richard how fond he used to be, in his school-time, of football. He was a little bright creature with a rather large head, but a delicate face and a sweet voice, and there was a perfect charm in him. All he said was so free from effort and spontaneous and was said with such a captivating gaiety that it was fascinating to hear him talk. Being of a more slender figure than Mr. Jarndyce and having a richer complexion, with browner hair, he looked younger. Indeed, he had more the appearance in all respects of a damaged young man than a well-preserved elderly one. There was an easy negligence in his manner and even in his dress (his hair carelessly disposed, and his neckkerchief loose and flowing, as I have seen artists paint their own portraits) which I could not separate from the idea of a romantic youth who had undergone some unique process of depreciation. It struck me as being not at all like the manner or appearance of a man who had advanced in life by the usual road of years, cares, and experiences.'

Clearly, a hopeless case Mr. Leigh Hunt, a fellow who'd spend your money, seduce your wife, and somehow expect you to see it all from his point of view. But say what you will about him, he did write 'Jenny Kissed Me', and I know of no more perfect little thing of eight lines in the language.

Jenny kissed me when we met,
Jumping from the chair she sat in;
Time, you thief, who love to get
Sweets into your list, put that in:
Say I'm weary, say I'm sad,
Say that health and wealth have missed me,
Say I'm growing old, but add,
Jenny kissed me.

Pictures: Red Tai, Utagawa Kunoyoshi,1797-186; Mr. Skimpole, Mervyn Peake, 1911-1968
Grace Andreacchihttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8876206268057902489.post-91960333638107928592010-03-08T13:41:00.003Z2010-04-01T14:00:56.605+01:00International Women's Day - les Dames d'un Certain Age

 SLIDESHOW OF LOVELY LADIES

Today is 'International Women's Day', and I'd like to seize the moment to remind us all of the tremendous beauty of the feminine, especially that glory that comes to us when we are no longer in the first flush of youth. For, while the beauty of young women is justly celebrated by poets down the ages, it takes a finer sensibility to point up for us the glories of that 'gold oft tried, and ever new'. Here that master of the metaphysical, John Donne, reminds us what it's all about. From a self-confessed 'dame d'un certain age' - thank you, John!

ELEGY IX. THE AUTUMNAL.

by John Donne

NO spring, nor summer beauty hath such grace
As I have seen in one autumnal face ;
Young beauties force our love, and that's a rape ;
This doth but counsel, yet you cannot scape.
If 'twere a shame to love, here 'twere no shame ;
Affections here take reverence's name.
Were her first years the Golden Age ? that's true,
But now they're gold oft tried, and ever new.
That was her torrid and inflaming time ;
This is her tolerable tropic clime.
Fair eyes ; who asks more heat than comes from hence,
He in a fever wishes pestilence.
Call not these wrinkles, graves ; if graves they were,
They were Love's graves, for else he is nowhere.
Yet lies not Love dead here, but here doth sit,
Vow'd to this trench, like an anachorite,
And here, till hers, which must be his death, come,
He doth not dig a grave, but build a tomb.
Here dwells he ; though he sojourn everywhere,
In progress, yet his standing house is here ;
Here, where still evening is, not noon, nor night ;
Where no voluptuousness, yet all delight.
In all her words, unto all hearers fit,
You may at revels, you at council, sit.
This is love's timber ; youth his underwood ;
There he, as wine in June, enrages blood ;
Which then comes seasonablest, when our taste
And appetite to other things is past.
Xerxes' strange Lydian love, the platane tree,
Was loved for age, none being so large as she ;
Or else because, being young, nature did bless
Her youth with age's glory, barrenness.
If we love things long sought, age is a thing
Which we are fifty years in compassing ;
If transitory things, which soon decay,
Age must be loveliest at the latest day.
But name not winter faces, whose skin's slack,
Lank as an unthrift's purse, but a soul's sack ;
Whose eyes seek light within, for all here's shade ;
Whose mouths are holes, rather worn out, than made ;
Whose every tooth to a several place is gone,
To vex their souls at resurrection ;
Name not these living death-heads unto me,
For these, not ancient, but antique be.
I hate extremes ; yet I had rather stay
With tombs than cradles, to wear out a day.
Since such love's motion natural is, may still
My love descend, and journey down the hill,
Not panting after growing beauties ; so
I shall ebb out with them who homeward go.

Photo: Dame Emme Kirkby, singer
Grace Andreacchihttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8876206268057902489.post-46509241442981871222010-02-17T15:58:00.003Z2010-04-01T14:01:45.791+01:00Perfect Joy

Today begins Lent, a serious time, if not necessarily a sombre one. For those unacquainted with the joys of high seriousness, I would like to recommend a very famous little book (famous among Christians, that is) - it is called The Fioretti or 'Little Flowers of St. Francis' and it was written over six hundred years ago by an obscure Italian friar and companion to Brother Francis, Fra Ugolino. There is so much poetry, humour and delicate wisdom in this little book that, no matter what your personal state of belief or unbelief, you will find yourself delighted by it. There is, for example, the story about the time Brother Juniper cut off a pig's foot to succour a sick brother - that one ends badly! (Hint - the poor pig is very much alive at the time), the story of how this same Brother Juniper kept giving away his clothes to the first beggar he saw, and wandering about town half-naked, much to the consternation of the locals.

And then there is Brother Francis's story about 'perfect joy'. Wherein he explains to Brother Leo that perfect joy is not to be found in what we achieve, but in what we bear, willingly, for love. First he describes a whole slew of incredible achievements – you achieve great holiness, you convert all the heathen, you speak with the tongues of men and angels, you heal the sick and raise the dead. Are any of these perfect joy by any chance? No way, says Francis. And then he imagines a scenario where, exhausted, they arrive at the monastery on a miserable night. The porter refuses, three times, to let them in, every time growing more angry:

"And if later, suffering intensely from hunger and the painful cold, with night falling, we still knock and call, and crying loudly beg them to open for us and let us come in for the love of God, and he grows still more angry and says: 'Those fellows are bold and shameless ruffians. I'll give them what they deserve.' And he comes out with a knotty club, and grasping us by the cowl throws us onto the ground, rolling us in the mud and snow, and beats us with that club so much that he covers our bodies with wounds - if we endure all those evils and insults and blows with joy and patience, reflecting that we must accept and bear the sufferings of the Blessed Christ patiently for love of Him, oh, Brother Leo, write: that is perfect joy"

A POEM FOR ASH WEDNESDAY

Picture: St. Francis of Assisi, Francisco de Zurbarán, 1598-1664
Grace Andreacchihttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8876206268057902489.post-69309944594934722082010-01-30T00:00:00.006Z2014-09-25T07:25:00.108+01:00Love on the Heights

"I cannot express it, but surely you and everybody have a notion that there is or should be an existence of yours beyond you. What were the use of my creation if I were entirely contained here? My great miseries in this world have been Heathcliff's miseries, and I watched and felt each from the beginning. My great thought in living is himself. If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be. And if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger -- I should not seem a part of it. My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods; time will change it, I'm well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath -- a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff! He's always, always in my mind -- not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being. So don't talk of our separation again. It is impracticable, and – "

This passage from Wuthering Heights struck me, the very first time I read it, at about eleven years old, as the truth about myself. I don't know whether 'everybody' has such a metaphysical notion, as Cathy suggests. I suspect, from my experience of life, most people think nothing of the sort. But I knew instantly that it was true about me. And that all my (then still very short) life I'd been on the qui vive, looking out for this person who was 'more myself than I am'. That I'd recognise him instantly, this much I knew for certain. I even bought a long cape with a hood to wear over my school uniform, in case I ran into him on the way to Mount St. Ursula - I wanted to be sure he'd recognise me too. I was in fact just sixteen when he turned up at last, but that, as they say, is another story...

This is love not as attachment, but as completion. You might call it 'metaphysical love'. We are not little shallow streams, we may love a few people in the course of a lifetime, sincerely and deeply. But only One can be that 'missing piece' that completes us.

"Each of us when separated, having one side only, like a flat fish, is but the indenture of a man, and he is always looking for his other half." - Plato, Symposium

A strange book, this Wuthering Heights! A most unusual young lady, the author Emily Brontë! She spent her entire short life in a Yorkshire village, she seems to have had no lovers and scarcely any friends. Indeed, she barely ever crossed the threshhold of that gloomy country parsonage where she was born. Yet this great-souled woman wrote a book so wild and crazy it defies explanation and merely demands to be read. She develops the idea of a metaphysical love that unites two people in a manner absolute.

"So don't talk of our separation again. It is impracticable, and – " says Cathy. And what?

'She paused, and hid her face in the folds of my gown,' says narrator Nelly Dean. Because Heathcliff and Cathy are separated, and this separation is the source of all their suffering. But the separation is only apparent. Even death, in the end, only serves to reunite them. Well, many people might think this a lot of romantic nonsense. Nelly Dean certainly does!

"If I can make any sense of your nonsense, miss," I said, "it only goes to convince me that you are ignorant of the duties you undertake in marrying, or else that you are a wicked, unprincipled girl."

Ah! me too, I am a wicked, unprincipled girl. Always have been.

ENJOY a metaphysical love sonnet
READ my own take on a metaphysical love story POETRY AND FEAR

Picture: Merle Oberon and Laurence Olivier in the film Wuthering Heights, 1939
Grace Andreacchihttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8876206268057902489.post-72126490724623419572010-01-05T19:31:00.006Z2010-04-01T14:03:40.624+01:00'Life Is Sweet, Brother'

"Life is sweet, brother."

"Do you think so?"

"Think so!—There's Night and Day,
Brother, both sweet things.
Sun, Moon, and Stars, Brother -
All sweet things -
And there's the wind on the heath, Brother.
Who would wish to die..."

It was on a golden afternoon in September, when the leaves were just beginning to turn their coats, that I came across this curious inscription on a gravestone in Berlin's Friedhof Dahlem. There were two names on the stone, like this:

Chrisopher Hoffmann

1937 - 1956

Professor Wolf Hoffmann

1898 - 1979

And that was all. No attribution, no explanation offered for these lovely and mysterious English words in a German cemetery. I wondered who the two Hoffmann gentlemen might have been - father and son perhaps? The younger had preceded the elder by many years to the undiscover'd country. And the English given name of 'Christopher' suggested something anglo-saxon or at least anglophile in the family. Perhaps the father had first chosen these words to soften the blow of a son lost.... I noted them down, and over the years sometimes returned to them, and wondered anew - Who might have written them?

In fact they belong to a little known autobiographical novel, Lavengro by the English author George Borrow (1803 - 1881). I like the sound of Signor Borrow - he got into boiling hot water for lampooning the good citizens of his native town, the infamously backwards Norwich. He taught himself several languages, including Romany and Russian, and wandered as far as St. Petersburg and Istanbul before settling down to write his curious books, half novels, half traveller's adventures. His The Bible in Spain is still popular in that country, and his account of a wild journey through Wales, enhanced by his agility in that tricky tongue, is also worth reading for its glimpses of a vanished world. But Lavengro has a peculiar charm all it own. Maybe it's something to do with the gypsies who populate its pages, for gypsies have a way of charming us, as needs must by wastrels and wanderers the world over. George Borrow lived with gypsies, walked the highways and byways with them, opened himself to their language and their wild poetry. The little exchange that first caught my attention continues in a manner rather less satisfactory for a gravestone. Here's a fuller account:

"What is your opinion of death, Mr. Petulengro?" said I, as I sat down beside him.

"My opinion of death, brother, is much the same as that in the old song of Pharaoh, which I have heard my grandam sing—

Canna marel o manus chivios andé puv,
Ta rovel pa leste o chavo ta romi.

When a man dies, he is cast into the earth, and his wife and child sorrow over him. If he has neither wife nor child, then his father and mother, I suppose; and if he is quite alone in the world, why, then, he is cast into the earth, and there is an end of the matter."

"And do you think that is the end of man?"

"There's an end of him, brother, more's the pity."

"Why do you say so?"

"Life is sweet, brother."

"Do you think so?"

"Think so!—There's night and day, brother, both sweet things; sun, moon, and stars, brother, all sweet things; there's likewise a wind on the heath. Life is very sweet, brother; who would wish to die?"

"I would wish to die—"

"You talk like a gorgio—which is the same as talking like a fool—were you a Rommany Chal you would talk wiser. Wish to die, indeed!—A Rommany Chal would wish to live for ever!"

"In sickness, Jasper?"

"There's the sun and stars, brother."

"In blindness, Jasper?"

"There's the wind on the heath, brother; if I could only feel that, I would gladly live for ever. Dosta, we'll now go to the tents and put on the gloves; and I'll try to make you feel what a sweet thing it is to be alive, brother!"

*

I never did find out anything more about the Hoffmann family, may they rest in peace. And whether life be bitter or sweet - that's a question I'll not venture to answer, having had a few fine mouthfuls of both those flavours. But I'm grateful for this delicate piece of writing, that came to me, a gift across worlds and time, once on an afternoon in golden September.

Picture: A Young Girl Raising Her Veil, by Bartolome Esteban Murillo, 1660

Grace Andreacchihttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8876206268057902489.post-6321044386464007582009-12-23T21:57:00.004Z2010-04-01T14:04:13.446+01:00I Sing of a Maiden

A very Merry Christmas and a Happy and Blessed New Year to all my Dear Readers!

Under the tree for you this year:
A NEW CHRISTMAS SONNET
THE PRODIGY - A NEW NOVELLA
(AS FREE E-BOOK, ON-LINE, OR PRINT BOOK)

I sing of a maiden
That is makeles;
King of alle kinges
To her son she ches.
He cam also stille
Ther His moder was,
As dew in Aprille
That falleth on the gras.
He cam also stille
To His moderes bowr,
As dew in Aprille
That falleth on the flowr.
He cam also stille
Ther His moder lay,
As dew in Aprille
That falleth on the spray.
Moder and maiden
Was never none but she;
Wel may swich a lady
Godes moder be.

How beautifully this well-known little carol from the 15th century captures the delicate mystery of Christmas. The middle English is not difficult, nonetheless I dare to disagree with the usual translation of 'makeles' as 'matchless' - the German word 'makellos' seems to me a more likely source in this context, for makellos means without any 'Makel' (spot or blemish), it means spotless, immaculate, virgin and pure, it means everything that Mary is.

'He came all so still', and this silence at the heart of holy love was written down one Christmas Day in 1841 by the self-styled 'Scardanelli', aka Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843), a German poet unlike any other, and a personal favourite of yours truly. Hölderlin was a genius and a madman, not an ordinary run-of-the-mill artistic madman, but the genuine article. He spent the last tragic decades of his life incarcerated in a tower by a friendly carpenter and his wife, who looked after him as best they could. Meanwhile he continued to write some of the most remarkable poetry in any language, poetry of mystical depth, philosophical complexity and linguistic simplicity that was to set the literary world on fire once he was safely dead. His best friends were the swans that populated the river Neckar below his tower. Perhaps, who knows? they were distant relations to those swans I met often on the darkest days in Berlin, when I too had need of such white-winged and pure-hearted companions. Here, without further ado, is Hölderlin's poem 'Winter':

WINTER

When the green is long gone from the plain
then a whiteness falls in the valley
Yet the day is bright with the sun's high beams
The Feast glows wide at the city gates.

This is nature's peace, this silence of the fields
is like to the holiness of men, and here's
the difference, for nature's highest self
is shown us here, not in spring's gentleness.

(trans. Grace Andreacchi)

WINTER

Wenn sich das Laub auf Ebnen weit verloren,
So fällt das Weiß herunter auf die Tale,
Doch glänzend ist der Tag vom hohen Sonnenstrahle,
Es glänzt das Fest den Städten aus den Toren.

Es ist die Ruhe der Natur, des Feldes Schweigen
Ist wie des Menschen Geistigkeit, und höher zeigen
Die Unterschiede sich, daß sich zu hohem Bilde
Sich zeiget die Natur, statt mit des Frühlings Milde.

d. 25 Dezember 1841.
Dero
untertänigster
Scardanelli.

Enjoy THE PRODIGY!

Pictures: Madonna and Child, Domenico Veneziano, 1435-37; Neubrandenburg, Caspar David Friedrich, c. 1817
Grace Andreacchihttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8876206268057902489.post-30535721622120836002009-12-21T19:11:00.001Z2009-12-21T19:30:39.611ZTHE PRODIGY<object height="265" width="320"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/kcYuLAfVew4&hl=en_GB&fs=1&rel=0&color1=0x3a3a3a&color2=0x999999"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/kcYuLAfVew4&hl=en_GB&fs=1&rel=0&color1=0x3a3a3a&color2=0x999999" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="320" height="265"></embed></object>

THE PRODIGY is a novella I wrote several years ago, at a time when I was obsessed with the beauty of the male countertenor voice. Ahime! A troubling obsession, about which we need not enter into needless and perhaps distressing detail. The book is now available in several formats (the above link will take you to all of them), and I made this little video in the depths of a snowy night while the world slept around me and Vivaldi's strangely morbid aria echoed again and again inside my overheated head. I think it captures something of the unbearable loveliness that made me write this book in the first place. See what you think!Grace Andreacchihttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8876206268057902489.post-50827812931919261742009-11-30T18:24:00.002Z2014-08-12T17:31:24.058+01:00Careless Love
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Love, oh, love, oh careless love
Love, oh, love, oh careless love
Love, oh, love, oh careless love
You see what careless love can do.
 - traditional

'I'll never cry for you again!' Who hasn't told that sweet, sad little lie to himself? Oh careless love! In Great Expectations, my favourite among the many beautifully crafted novels of Charles Dickens, young Pip experiences just such a moment, rendered with all the delicacy and grace we expect from the Master. In the (almost) equally great film from David Lean (above), the child actors perform with astonishing candour, the dialogue is all Dickens's own, and the match is well-nigh perfect. Pip has fallen under Estella's spell, and Estella is as troublesome a specimen of das Ewigweibliche as you'll find in the whole of world literature, or anywhere else for that matter.

As we were going with our candle along the dark passage, Estella stopped all of a sudden, and, facing round, said in her taunting manner, with her face quite close to mine,—

"Well?"

"Well, miss?" I answered, almost falling over her and checking myself.

She stood looking at me, and, of course, I stood looking at her.

"Am I pretty?"

"Yes; I think you are very pretty."

"Am I insulting?"

"Not so much so as you were last time," said I.

"Not so much so?"

"No."

She fired when she asked the last question, and she slapped my face with such force as she had, when I answered it.

"Now?" said she. "You little coarse monster, what do you think of me now?"

"I shall not tell you."

"Because you are going to tell up stairs. Is that it?"

"No," said I, "that's not it."

"Why don't you cry again, you little wretch?"

"Because I'll never cry for you again," said I. Which was, I suppose, as false a declaration as ever was made; for I was inwardly crying for her then, and I know what I know of the pain she cost me afterwards.

Another fine example of high Victorian passion is this memorable passage from Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, The deliciously Byronic Mr. Rochester (mad, bad and quite dangerous to know) is contemplating the idea of separation from Jane when this little exchange takes place:

"Are you anything akin to me, do you think, Jane?"

I could risk no sort of answer by this time; my heart was full.

"Because," he said, "I sometimes have a queer feeling with regard to you — especially when you are near to me, as now: it is as if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly and inextricably knotted to a similar string situated in the corresponding quarter of your little frame. And if that boisterous Channel, and two hundred miles or so of land, come broad between us, I am afraid that cord of communion will be snapped; and then I've a nervous notion I should take to bleeding inwardly."

You see what careless love can do? Let that great lady Bessie Smith explain it to you...Grace Andreacchihttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8876206268057902489.post-73160873763745658402009-11-25T11:02:00.004Z2010-01-27T13:42:50.545ZTwo Hands Clapping<object height="285" width="340"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/DQ22AhL3Bf8&hl=en_GB&fs=1&rel=0&border=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/DQ22AhL3Bf8&hl=en_GB&fs=1&rel=0&border=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="340" height="285"></embed></object>

We first met almost by accident, in cyberspace - I was looking for an artist to illustrate a book of children's poems, the artist Alexandra Rozenman was thinking about a collaboration with a writer or poet. The children's poems were soon put aside in favour of something else – a series of poems directly inspired by the original drawings. There is a quality of strangeness about Alexandra's work, an 'otherness', something surreal, delicate, fleeting that invites fantasy. 'Every picture tells a story' the saying goes, and these really do, but the stories are as complex and disturbing as our dreams. Who are the wiry bird-like creatures, tragi-comic in their awkward postures, that inhabit this world? What is that dripping through the ceiling? Sky? Tears? And are those eyes lying on the floor? The poems suggest but don't dictate: in this book you're invited, through pictures and poetry, to form your own answers to these questions. Alexandra and I hope you have as much joy along the way as we two have done. What is the sound of two hands clapping? Open this beautiful little book to find out.

ON SALE HERE
A high quality art book printed on thick coated stock

TWO HANDS

Two hands
are better than one
to stroke strike pet and polish
Two have more fun

One sharp smack! and it's clear
what we wanted to say
A smack like that
flies free through the air
might land
anywhere
light as bird upon tree

What is the sound
of two hands clapping?
Open and see…Grace Andreacchihttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8876206268057902489.post-16168373040081966412009-11-10T15:53:00.006Z2010-04-02T01:23:19.362+01:00Out There - The Poetry of Youth

About halfway through Mikael Covey's Out There an astonishing moment occurs. The young narrator, a boy at that difficult, exciting time of life when the simplicities of childhood have fallen away but are yet to be replaced by the greater, even more exigent simplicities of the adult world, has lost his way in a snowstorm and is in serious danger of freezing to death, 'frozen in time and space' in the middle of a Nebraska winter. His rescue comes in a manner that is at once so unlikely and yet so utterly natural that a perfect little apotheosis is created, lifting the book onto a plain of truly spiritual beauty. That one can use such a phrase as 'spiritual beauty' in connection with a novel at all is something of a rarity, and should give the reader some idea of the richness hiding inside this deceptively simple tale of sex, drugs and rock and roll in the '70's. The hero, part Holden Caulfield part Jack Kerouac, has just finished high school when the story begins. He sets out with a couple of buddies from his godforsaken home, a small town lost amidst the vast prairies of Nebraska, in search of fun in sunny California. The journey across country is lyrical, memorable:

Then crossing the border into the wild wide-open Montana sky of a million miles of blue and dark green hills and get this, no fences just wild wide-open, no people, animals nothing, not even birds, just nothing for miles and hours and you better not run out of gas because there aint nothing here…
Easy promises of paradise are soon blighted by harsh realities, nothing is ever quite as bright as hope, and the boy may never escape the hateful, mean life he dreads. But how he tries! He tries with drugs, he tries with girls, he even tries with work, and there's a wonderful bit about the pleasures of life in a seed supply shop. The boy's a star, with his clear-eyed, compassionate, unflinching gaze turned as effectively on himself as on those around him. The prose is free, lyrical, as wildly beautiful and harsh as the land from which it sprung.

But while I suspect Covey draws somewhat on his own biography - like his hero he hails originally from Georgia but grew up in Nebraska - this is so far from being just another coming of age novel. It cleverly undercuts the boy's passionate enthusiasm with an older, wiser voice, that speaks with a Buddha-like resignation, looking back on his old self with insight and wit. For it's also a very funny book sometimes, funny in a way that makes the reader squirm with recognition. But the comedy is there, like the drugs, to relieve the pain, for in this quiet American prairie boy's life, nothing shall remain in the end but tears.

I was deeply impressed by Covey's beautiful, symphonic language as well as by the delicate, nuanced truthfulness he brings to his task. This is a memorable book.

On sale HERE and HERE

Andromache Books, 2009
ISBN 978-1-4092-8869-5
Published: July 2009
Pages: 174

Cover Photo by Olivia BeeGrace Andreacchihttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-8876206268057902489.post-34994554691102648832009-10-19T12:35:00.003+01:002011-11-07T14:30:03.400ZTWO BROTHERS
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Open publication

 One brother is rich and selfish, the other is poor and noble-hearted. When the poor brother helps a little swallow with a broken leg, he's rewarded in an extraordinary manner. What's growing inside those giant pumpkins anyway...? A tale of brotherly love and hate from ancient Korea. Based on the Pansori tale 'Heungbu and Nolbu', this first appeared in Horizon Review.

Now available as a high quality PRINT BOOK or as a
FREE E BOOK (click above) or on MOBIPOCKET

Or read it right HERE (no flash required)Grace Andreacchihttp://firstname.lastname@example.com