Claire’s turn to set the brief this month. Here it is….
John and Neil’s emails make me think I should perhaps set the brief around literary borrowings, since my brain is already seething with possibilities… However that really would be plagiarism, so I’ll stick with the idea that was forming in my mind yesterday as the deadline loomed.
Over the summer I read Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence. A brilliant book, which actually caused me to miss my tube stop not once, but twice (yes, on the same journey – you can imagine the expletives uttered under my breath as I looked up to realise I was sailing past Oxford Circus for the second time, this time in the opposite direction). If you haven’t read it, it’s all about the conventions that hold society and a certain way of life together (late 19th century New York), and how people choose to live both within and outside it – mostly within. Also over the summer various things made me think about society today and the conventions and events that hold it together. In July, I went to the funeral of a much loved elderly relative, who was herself both of and within society, if you know what I mean, but who was wonderfully irreverent and not in the least stuffy. There were many people there from all walks of life who’d known and loved her, which was rather uplifting. Then, last weekend, I was in Scotland for my father’s 70th birthday, and there was a gathering of the clans for the inevitable party. So I’ve been thinking a lot about how the way we live as human beings is both marked and determined by rites of passage, and that, essentially is the brief. Or, if that’s not clear enough:
Reflect on society and its rites of passage.
I won’t be any more specific than that – make of it what you will… hmmm… sounds rather like an exam question…
Les, last time, in hospital
Walking outside
you can see the sky better
on windows in winter,
reflected in the grey of unseen panes.
Running outside
you can see the sky glitter
in puddles of water,
shining like mirrors with a lattice of trees.
Seeing him yesterday,
perhaps for the last time,
he sees from the inside
the sky in its immense greyness,
hitched to the drip
of life screening liquid
through the tangle of wires.
Not ready yet
but getting there.
Martin Lee writes
I thought I’d have a rite of passage of my own in responding to this. So, having never, ever attempted to write anything in the sonnet form, for some reason I thought I’d launch out and have a go. The stumbling effort somehow feels like an appropriate match for teenage rites of passage. So, if it reads as being a bit clunky, then it’s totally deliberate. Ahem. Think I’ve covered myself there…
17 in the 70s
Stealing something, anything, from the Spar,
Fags are best, though not because we’re smokers,
It’s to appease that bastard Johnny Carr
And his band of hangers on and jokers.
Will there come a stage ever in this life
When I don’t always have to prove my spurs,
When I can leave behind this teenage strife,
And move on to the rules of His and Hers?
Because the need to fit in and conform
Chameleon with never resting eye
In order to adapt to each new norm,
Has made me wake up to the fact that I
Want more than quick gropes at the disco
And watching The Streets of San Francisco.
Paul Redstone writes about becoming a dad
Newly born
Shifting constructions of dream matter
Have been replaced by the need
Simply to be here
Now by turns I am rock, water, air, fire
And on any weekday I would die for you
Or kill
Without regret or question.
Jamie Jauncey writes
Meeting first grandchild
On the day I turn sixty
Talk about my rites
Andy Milligan writes
Dear Angels all
A late, late, late showing (*pant pant*) – later than a blackmailed David Letterman’s Late Late show – for Claire’s brief. Typically late of course. But I keep my record of having responded to every brief.
I took Claire’s brief very personally: “Reflect on society and its rites of passage”. As my elder son has just moved to ‘big school’, it struck a chord with me. And here’s what came out and lord knows why but Gilbert and Sullivan were in my head as I was writing it, perhaps because it ’struck a chord’..
The New School Song
There’s a rhythm to the Register from which the names are called
Which remind us of the places we come from:
It was Tim and Sid and Alistair
Eric, Jack and Fred;
Now it’s Quentin, Tarquin, Mungo, Midge and Q’um (yes, ‘Q’um’)
And the alphabet arranges, as the school timetable changes,
Into subjects that perplex and stir the ire.
It was Numeracy and Literacy,
ICT and PHSE;
Now it’s Latin, French, Geography,
Maths, Design Technology,
History, Biology
And Compulsory Choir (or is that ‘Quire’?)
Hierarchy has vocabulary that’s a buttress against anarchy
And keeps us in the sets where we belong.
Instead of Head Teachers and Classes
We have Forms and we’ve High Masters
And a week’s Half-Term’s now ‘Remedy’ a fortnight long (too long!)
He comes laden home with literature that’s foreign,
Strange and technical
And which makes his body shake and sometimes groan;
But he sits for hours studying,
While we sit somewhat worrying,
He enjoys rising to the challenge on his own (good man!)
For when rules are given, ends are clear, structures set from here to there,
Then there’s a rhythm and a reason to each day.
For the randomness is organised,
The arbitrary’s justified,
So there’s progress and there’s meaning and there’s somehow fellow feeling
I guess school is just like language in that way! (We say!)
Claire Falcon writes
His face shines upon me
Come close and all you see are roughly-hewn shapes, a knobbly etching, the accumulation of years of exposure to the wind, the rain and the sun. Stand back just a little, and the traveller becomes clear, his questing eyes endlessly searching the horizon. By his side, a faithful donkey, placing simple trust in his master’s omnipotence.
Who are they, these travelling figures, frozen forever in their path through the plaza? No plaque proclaims their fame, no distinguishing feature reveals their identity. But something in their stance, their restless immobility, speaks to me, a fellow traveller, equally anonymous in this city of endless cobbles and secret, winding alleyways.
I came for solitude. Blissful, restful, anonymous solitude.
Sitting by this traveller – alone, yet, with a companion in his donkey, never truly alone – it comes to me. I too am alone, but never truly alone. There is another living being with me, although I can’t hear it, feel it or see it. I can talk to it, as the traveller might talk to his donkey, but I will hear no words in return. And yet, where I go, it will go; what I feel, it will feel; what I experience, it will experience.
I have been searching my own horizon, but with eyes veiled in fear.
‘The Lord make his face to shine upon you.’
In this enveloping sunlight, with my silent guide, I begin to see what that might mean.
‘And be gracious unto you.’
My own, as yet silent, companion is my witness that the Lord has indeed been gracious unto me. I knew it, but now I feel it. And at last, in my own way, I can be thankful.